Microsoft aborts the pwa experiment and drafts a native-app task force for windows 11
Windows 11 is about to shed its Electron skin. microsoft has quietly green-lit a strike team whose sole mandate is to rebuild the operating system’s most visible apps—Mail, Calendar, Clipchamp, even pieces of Copilot—as truly native code, stripping out the Chromium intermediaries that have bloated RAM meters and user patience since 2021.
The anatomy of a silent surrender
Rudy Huyn, the French engineer who once squeezed full-featured Instagram and Dropbox clients into Windows Phone’s tightest corners, now carries the same scalpel into the belly of Windows itself. His internal squad, formed last month and revealed to staff on Monday, will not “wrap” web pages; it will compile to WinUI 3 and the Win32/WinRT metal. Sources inside the OS group say the brief is simple: 60 % smaller memory footprints, instant cold-start, and GPU-driven animations that feel like the shell, not the browser.
The confession is implicit. Every marquee Windows 11 experience launched under the “hybrid” banner—Clipchamp, the new Teams, the first Copilot sidebar—ships as a Progressive Web App or an Electron envelope. Task Manager screenshots became a meme: 400 MB to trim a video, 600 MB to chat. Even WhatsApp, lured by microsoft’s own tooling, abandoned its UWP heritage for Chromium, ballooning typical usage from 90 MB to 350 MB on Windows. Users noticed; OEMs on entry-level 4 GB laptops noticed more.
Why now and why it might still flop
Two pressure points converged. Internally, telemetry shows that “app sluggishness” shot into the top three driver of Windows 11 roll-backs, beating even start-menu placement nostalgia. Externally, Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon X Elite laptops—and their promised 22-hour battery life—can’t afford DOM-heavy apps that keep the CPU awake. Native ARM64 binaries, compiled through Huyn’s team, are the only way microsoft can hit the autonomy figures it has already printed on marketing slides.
Yet the road is littered with discarded frameworks: first WinRT, then UWP, then React Native for Windows, each hailed as the final answer. Developers remember. Meta, Adobe and Spotify will wait for proof, not promises. One former Windows partner engineer puts it bluntly: “If the new Mail app ships and still needs a Service Worker to sync, the rebellion dies on day one.”
microsoft has hedged: the old PWAs will stay in the Store, but they will be demoted in search rank. The company will also foot the migration bill for any third-party willing to rewrite, offering direct access to shell APIs reserved for first-party titles—an olive branch not extended since the Windows 8 era.
Still, the clock is short. Insiders expect the first native drops in the 24H2 update scheduled for September. If Clipchamp opens in under two seconds on an 8 GB Surface Go, skepticism will evaporate. If not, the PWA genie—once invited to solve cross-platform headaches—will keep squatting inside the Windows house, drinking memory and credibility straight from the carton.