Whatsapp is almost non-existent in North America so they can do whatever the hell they want with it and we'll take it.

The answer is that developers mainly use Macs, and they don't want to deal with a crappy Electron application in daily use so they give themselves the privilege of a better experience even if it makes no business sense.

You can see the same with Telegram, which has first party Electron applications for Windows / macOS / Linux, a first party native macOS application, and a bunch of third party blessings including a Windows UWP application.

Note that there needs be an environment for this. You don't see a native version of VSCode or 1Password 8 because those orgs actually care about their applications and take great effort to make them feel good despite being built on Electron.

If you consider the pipeline for new employees in big tech, I doubt many of them have experience of (or much interest in) true native Windows app development. They have probably been marinated in web-style development and so that's what they are good at and indeed prefer to do.

In a way, the blame lies with Microsoft (and not e.g. Meta) for failing to keep new generations interested in its native frameworks.

Pretty clear what’s happened from reading the article. The native Mac application comes for free as a result of their native iOS application.

The same is not true of the native windows application.

More discussion:

Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45910347