Some decisions are small annoyances. Others reveal where the industry is heading. This one belongs in the second category.
The Day WhatsApp Gave Up on Caring
At some point in the history of software you expect companies to make compromises. But every once in a while a decision appears that is so lazy, so indifferent to users, so proudly mediocre that it deserves its own footnote in the long decline of desktop software. WhatsApp abandoning its native Windows client and replacing it with a thin web wrapper is exactly that kind of footnote.
Let us be honest. This is not innovation. It is not progress. It is the technical equivalent of giving up. Instead of maintaining an actual application that integrates with the operating system, behaves predictably, and respects system resources, WhatsApp now ships a packaged browser tab. Wrapped, relabelled, and sent out as if nothing of value has been lost. It is the same logic as pouring instant soup into a porcelain bowl and calling it cooking.
Not that I care about Windows or Windows users anyway. My sympathy for that ecosystem is limited. But what worries me is the trend it represents. A growing indifference toward native software, toward performance, toward integration, toward anything that requires real engineering effort. If companies can get away with shipping a browser embedded inside another browser, they will. And the next company will follow, and the next, until the entire desktop begins to feel like a hollow stage set built around a single rendering engine.
For users, this downgrade means slower startup times, higher RAM usage, and an application that behaves nothing like a real application. Notifications feel off, window handling feels off, performance feels off. Everything carries the unmistakable scent of a product that exists to make the developer’s life easier, not the user’s.
This is the modern corporate logic. When the technical debt grows too large and the motivation to fix it gets too small, someone in a meeting eventually asks the fatal question. Why do we even bother maintaining a native client when we can simply wrap the web version. And once that sentence is spoken, the rest is inevitable. Costs go down, quality goes down with them, and the marketing team rewrites the announcement to make regression look like progress.
The discontinuation of the old native client is the real statement. Not our platform. Not our problem. Users will adapt. Users always adapt.
The danger is not this single example. The danger is the pattern. It lowers expectations. It normalises mediocrity. It trains people to accept slower, heavier, more fragile software because the company decided that convenience for itself matters more than performance for its users. And once this becomes the norm, reversing it becomes almost impossible.
WhatsApp’s new wrapper is not an upgrade. It is a quiet admission of defeat. It is software that has become less because the company decided that caring is optional.
If you want good software, you run it locally, you build it locally, and you keep it under your control. Because the way things are heading, your applications will not live on your machine anymore, they will merely pass through it.