https://www.ghacks.net/2025/07/21/whatsapp-desktop-uwp-app-is-being-replaced-by-a-web-wrapper/
With WhatsApp finally switching over to becoming a PWA (and unintentionally bringing video call functionality to Linux users), I wonder how viable would a Signal PWA be?
Obviously Signal Desktop had significant issues in the past, but would a PWA implementation be an improvement at all? A PWA may bring much needed sandboxing functionality beyond a community-maintained flatpak version.
I don’t know a lot about this but I wanted to reply to bring up an issue that I haven’t seen get talked about much.
In a messaging app with a centralized server where the company can’t see the data because it is encrypted, the possibility is still there to feed the user a javascript that can do client side scanning really easily. This would also apply to a hacker or anyone who got access to the server, like law enforcement. This wouldn’t be so easily the case in the scenario of an app that was open source and buildable and presumably verifiable since that app would have to have the code in it and it would be visible.
That’s the only downside that I know of but like I said I’m pretty ignorant on the topic.