WhatsApp for Windows WebView2 inefficiencies and performance issues

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WhatsApp is the worst app on your Windows 11 PC right now, eating 1.2GB of RAM doing nothing

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It's time for Meta to switch to a native WinUI app for WhatsApp. WebView2 is too slow

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 web app stuck in the loading screen<br>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.

https://www.windowslatest.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/WhatsApp-Windows-app-after-restarting-PC.mp4

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.

https://www.windowslatest.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/WhatsApp-hasnt-been-logged-in-yet.mp4

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.

https://www.windowslatest.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Side-by-side-comparison-of-UWP-WhatsApp-vs-Chromium-based-WhatsApp.mp4

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...

windows whatsapp password meta search account

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