If you’re among the people who use WhatsApp as your primary messaging app, you’d know that the experience in Windows is beyond unusable. And because Meta is a trillion-dollar company with more than 75,000 employees, and all the data centres and AI chops to go with it, it’s not like they can’t fix the awfully slow WhatsApp for Windows.
WhatsApp has 3 billion monthly active users. Windows has 1.6 billion users. WhatsApp for Windows has millions of users, and I can confirm that there is not a single person who has a good experience using it, because I tested the web-wrapper-based WhatsApp for Windows on low-end, midrange, and high-end hardware. Props to Meta for giving the same experience on any budget!
After restarting my PC, I screen-recorded how much RAM the web-based WhatsApp uses even without it opening. It was already touching 400 MB.
You might be thinking that WhatsApp is syncing all my chat history in the background so that when I open it, it’s all up to date, right?
Well, no. Because I haven’t even logged into it yet. I’m not making this up.
That’s how bad the situation is with WhatsApp for Windows, and I’m just getting started. Honestly, I should’ve just left WhatsApp when we first broke the news a year ago about Meta planning WhatsApp’s switch to WebView2 from UWP, but WhatsApp is just so popular with my friends and family.
Instead, I logged out of WhatsApp for Windows and now use WhatsApp Web in a browser, which, ironically, is faster than the dedicated Windows app. I do prefer a proper chat app over a browser tab, but that preference only holds if the app is worth using.
WhatsApp for Windows is a performance nightmare
After logging in and scrolling through chats, RAM usage easily jumped toward 1.2 GB. Idle, it still holds on to around 600 MB.
I wouldn’t mind the RAM usage if the app were fast. But it is slow, and heavy at the same time. Sending a message has an anxiety-inducing delay before the single tick appears, which means the message has not even left your device. People on the other end feel like you are toggling between online and offline because messages show up in bursts, not in real time. Chat switching takes a visible second or more. Scrolling is choppy compared to what the UWP app used to deliver.
For anyone wondering, the old UWP WhatsApp ran over 100 one-to-one chats and around 30 active groups, and it used less than 100 MB at idle!
Obviously, I’m not alone, and everyone has been raising the same concerns since Meta pushed the update. Reports of the app freezing, messages not delivering on time, and the app feeling “half-broken” after waking a PC from sleep are widespread. Waking from hibernate has logged out users on multiple occasions, which Windows Latest also noticed during testing.
Closing the window does not quit the app either. It minimises to the system tray and continues running in the background, holding a sizeable chunk of RAM, just to receive notifications via service workers.
The old UWP app used Windows’ built-in notification APIs, so it did not need to stay alive in the background for that. With the new one, if you exit it from the tray and miss a message, the notification only says “You may have new messages”. Helpful.
And if you closed the app, Exit it from the system tray, open it the very second, it would take a lot of time for WhatsApp to load up.
On a 10-year-old PC, it gets worse
My dad’s PC is a good example of what most people with older hardware are dealing with. It runs Windows 11 on a 6th-generation Intel Core i3 with 8 GB of RAM. My brother has installed a sizeable stack of software on it for his studies, including data analytics tools, machine learning libraries, visualization apps, Cursor, and more. Despite all of that, Windows itself is still fast and smooth on that machine.
Of all the apps installed, only one is slow. WhatsApp.
My dad is not a phone person. He prefers typing on a keyboard and catching up with old school friends on WhatsApp groups from his PC. But ever since Meta pushed the new web-wrapper update, he cannot reply in time. In active group conversations, messages come in slowly. His replies reach others slowly. He gets left behind in conversations he should be part of. On the CPU side, WhatsApp alone was consuming 22.4% of CPU while doing nothing but sitting with one chat open.
There was nothing wrong with the UWP app on that PC. It used around 100 MB and ran without a single hiccup. The switch to WebView2 literally made my dad’s life difficult!
What is a web wrapper, and why does it make for a bad messaging app
A web wrapper is not a standalone app in any native sense. When you open WhatsApp for Windows now, it is essentially loading web.whatsapp.com inside a Chromium-based container called WebView2, which is Microsoft’s rendering engine. The “app” is a shell.
Chromium does not run as a single process. It spawns separate processes for GPU rendering, networking, audio, storage, sandboxing, and crash reporting. Each of these runs independently in the background. So, you end up with a cascade of WebView2 sub-processes all eating CPU and RAM.
A messaging app needs to be running in the background at all times. A native app can hook into the operating system’s notification APIs and sit idle with minimal footprint. A web wrapper cannot do that without keeping a live browser process running, which is why even closing WhatsApp for Windows does not free your RAM.
Running everything through a browser engine is the wrong architectural choice for a communications app. And given that RAM prices have nearly doubled driven by AI data center demand crowding out consumer supply, an app that casually consumes 600 MB to 1.2 GB for messaging is not a small inconvenience. It’s even worse for anyone with 8 GB of RAM.
Microsoft should not be doing this either
Microsoft should get the blame first. Microsoft Teams, which serves enterprise customers who depend on it daily, is still a WebView2-based web wrapper. As we recently reported, Teams claims to be more responsive now, but still eats RAM while doing nothing. At idle, it sits at around 1 GB of RAM.
Microsoft’s response has been to restructure the app rather than rewrite it. A new process called ms-teams_modulehost.exe handles calling features separately from the main process, which is a band-aid over a fundamentally web-based architecture. Microsoft also has a separate problem in that its Teams UI is crowded enough to cause accidental screen shares during calls, an embarrassment the company has since acknowledged and promised to fix.
The company that owns Windows, knows Windows better than anyone, and ships software on Windows, is still running its flagship communication app as a web wrapper. If Microsoft cannot lead by example, there is little incentive for anyone else to.
Why Windows keeps getting web apps instead of native ones
The deeper problem here is a trust deficit. As a developer explained to Windows Latest in April 2026, one of the reasons developers gravitate toward web apps is that Microsoft’s own native framework history is inconsistent. Microsoft built UWP, pushed it heavily, then quietly moved on. Developers who invested in UWP saw Microsoft’s commitment fade.
I believe this is one reason why Meta ditched UWP in favour of a web app for WhatsApp. The company built a solid UWP WhatsApp app. It was lightweight, fast, and used native Windows APIs. Then Microsoft’s enthusiasm for UWP cooled, WinUI emerged as the successor, and Meta made the calculation that maintaining a native Windows app was not worth the risk of betting on another framework Microsoft might eventually abandon. So they shipped a web wrapper instead.
Microsoft also confused the ecosystem in recent months. We reported that Microsoft was considering dumping native Copilot in favour of a web wrapper, and separately, encouraged developers to build Electron apps on Windows, saying native code was not required. Sending such signals while simultaneously expecting developers to commit to WinUI is contradictory.
Also, note that WinUI is still not devoid of flaws, as Microsoft recently confirmed its lack of proper window resizing with noticeable tearing. Fortunately, the company also said that they are fixing it.
Microsoft is finally pushing back, but needs to bring Meta along
To be fair, Microsoft has started course-correcting. At Build 2026, the company encouraged developers to build native apps using WinUI and announced it is killing web app slop in Windows 11. Microsoft is also rewriting Windows 11’s own shell components in native code, replacing sluggish React Native and WebView elements with WinUI.
The company has committed to building 100% native apps for Windows 11, is hiring engineers to build native apps as web apps continue to hurt the OS experience, and a Microsoft engineer has stated that native apps are back. There is also a concrete signal with Microsoft committing to native UI as users push back against web app slop.
All of this is good news. But it is hollow unless Microsoft can bring third-party developers back to native development, and that requires trust. The company has to make WinUI genuinely easy to build with, well-documented, and stable enough that a company like Meta would not fear waking up one day to find it deprecated. If Microsoft leads with inbox native apps that are fast and visibly better than web wrappers, and makes a clear, long-term commitment to WinUI, developers will follow.
1.5 billion Windows users, and still no native WhatsApp
I wouldn’t have written this article if Meta were consistent with this behaviour of making their desktop app a web wrapper for all desktop operating systems. But no. macOS, which has a tiny market share compared to Windows, already has a well-functioning WhatsApp, and funnily enough, even fewer people use it as they prefer Apple’s own iMessage.
It’s fine. It’s macOS. They get all the native apps. But the same Meta that couldn’t allocate resources to make a native Windows app has made a well-optimized WhatsApp for the Apple Watch.
This shows where their priorities lie. Windows users, who are the majority of the world and from different life circumstances, who may use a budget Windows PC, because they can’t afford MacBooks, are all stuck with a sluggish web app.
Meta has been logging more Windows users out to force them onto the new web-wrapper version since late 2025. Windows Latest first reported the UWP-to-Chromium switch back in July 2025, confirmed the transition date in October 2025, and even tracked Meta testing a “Resume” feature to pick up Android chats on Windows, a feature that would be compelling if the app were not so slow to begin with.
Adding features to a broken foundation is not progress. If Meta can build a native WhatsApp for macOS and watchOS, it can do the same for Windows. The resources are there. The platform has 1.5 billion users. There is no excuse for shipping a browser tab as a desktop app and calling it an update.
My message to Meta
There has never been a better time to build a native WhatsApp for Windows. Microsoft has committed to WinUI as the long-term native framework for Windows 11, with no signs of abandoning it the way UWP was quietly sidelined. The company is rewriting its own shell in native code, pushing developers toward WinUI at Build 2026, and investing in making the framework easier to build with. The uncertainty that may have once made the native Windows investment feel risky is gone. If Meta builds a WinUI WhatsApp now, it is building on a foundation Microsoft has publicly and repeatedly committed to.
