Is it just me or have desktop applications started becoming shittier and shittier by the moment, especially windows apps. I mean, regardless of the fact that they all have to run on Windows 11 which we can all agree is the shittiest piece of Software Microsoft ever released. I literally had two encounters today which have really drawn my attention closer and closer to it.
Let me start off with WhatsApp, which used to be a very good way through which I would quickly share files between my phone and laptop simply by sending the files to myself on one device and downloading them on the other device. Now that in itself has become something I dread thinking about. Starting up the application itself literally eats more ram than I can even begin to explain, and that’s before the application is even ready for use. It makes sense since Meta switches from a Native desktop app to a chromium based web wrapper for the application which just makes it a glorified browser tab and ruins the whole point of having the application in the first place. Every time you open up the app, it has to fetch all or a great majority of your info included simple chats.
Then there’s the most recent addition to this, Postman which I think enraged me more than I can express right now😂🤦🏽♂️. Picture this, I recently changed PCs and am just now downloading most of the tools I use-Postman being one of them- And the day I download the application to setup and start testing some of my backend routes would you believe it that very day just a couple of hours later the app crashes and tells me I need to update it. Postman, I literally downloaded this from your official site today!!! How the hell do I already need an update. I had to struggle and I mean struggle to even get the app running smoothly and finally got to testing my endpoints. Would you have it something comes up and I have to leave home. But guess what??….I have limited support and functionality when the app is offline. What even is that!?!? So I need to be online, have a stable internet connection just to hit an endpoint on a server running on the exact PC as the app I’m using to test that endpoint?!
Sometimes I just want to work, not connected to the internet or anything like that, just me and the various tools I use but it seems these apps want you to constantly be connected to them at all times. And it’s not just these two apps, they are just the ones which really pissed me off today. The list goes on and on there’s also Slack which on multiple occasions has crashed on me, especially when I was offline, the Claude desktop app which also just doesn’t open most times without internet and seems to have like 9 background processes running at startup for some reason
I thought the whole point of downloading and installing an application was so you could have functionality without necessarily having to be connected to the internet, but I guess that’s no longer the point