Meta has bad (or good, depending on how you look at it) news for WhatsApp users on Windows: It appears that the messenger is moving away from a native UWP app to a Progressive Web App. Users noticed that the latest WhatsApp Beta release is now a web-based app.
Starting with version 2.2569.0.0, WhatsApp Beta for Windows is no longer a UWP app. Instead, it is a web-based application that uses WebView2 on Windows. You can easily check that by launching the Task Manager and expanding the WhatsApp Beta process (notice the difference in memory consumption):
Here is what the messenger looked like before with version 2.2564.282.0:
Web apps are universally disliked among Windows users these days, especially when they arrive as "upgrades" for native applications. The WhatsApp client for Windows initially came as a web app and was then updated to Electron and then to UWP, offering all the benefits of native apps. Now, however, Meta is making a step back, returning to PWA. A thread on Reddit already has reports of users encountering memory leaks (don't you like when WhatsApp takes 1GB of RAM?) and other issues.
In addition to being less gentle with system resources, the latest WhatsApp Beta ditches native Windows UI elements, which only make the messenger look out of place on Windows computers. However, WhatsApp makes up for that with Channels and more features for Status and Communities.
As of right now, there is no information on when the new web-based WhatsApp client will make it to all users in the Stable channel. Interestingly, WhatsApp is not the only Meta product heading that way. Messenger used to be a native UWP app, which eventually was replaced with a web app. While the overwhelming reaction from users is negative, many argue that switching to PWA will actually improve the experience by eliminating bugs and delivering the previously missing features.
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