Changes In WhatsApp For Windows
Doug Lee
Last Revised November, 2025

This document is meant to help users of WhatsApp for Windows adapt to the changes in that application that were posted to the public around November 13, 2025. At that time and on closely surrounding dates, at least for a substantial number of users according to this author's estimations, Meta replaced the long-standing UWP app with a web-based application version.

Table of Contents

• The New Way To Find Options In a List
• Key Collisions With Old JAWS Scripts
• Things That Are Better
• Other Notes

The New Way To Find Options In a List

The Application or Menu button, commonly used for Context menus, does not work in the new app. This is likely due to limitations placed on browser-based apps.

This WhatsApp update brings with it a creative solution to this problem. Left and Right arrows move to options for a list item, while Up and Down arrows still move among list items as usual. In general, Left and Right arrows move through a "circle" of options; so either arrow can get to all choices. Examples:

• From an entry in the chat list, either Left or Right moves to a Context menu button for the chat.
• From a text message, press Left arrow for the React button or Right arrow for a Context menu button for more options.
• From a voice message, Right moves to the Play button and Left moves to React. Moving farther in either direction, you can find the Context menu button and also the position slider for the voice message.
• On a slider, pressing Space makes Left and Right arrows change the position. This is also fairly silent, probably to keep speech from interfering with the message being played.

Key Collisions With Old JAWS Scripts

In the new app, Alt+S opens Settings and moves focus to the "Search settings" edit box. This was a script command in the old WhatsApp to read the status area for the current chat. This author's scripts provide the key sequence [ S to read this area.

Things That Are Better

This author considers the following to be improvements in the new WhatsApp as compared to the old:

• Pinned messages are before the message list in a chat's tab order, instead of appearing between the Edit box and the message list. This minimizes the number of required tabs to move between the typing area and the message list. This is also how this author has seen the tab order organized in other chat apps, such as Unigram (a more accessible Telegram for Windows).
• Included help on several controls. At least during the time of transition to the new app, this is likely to help users understand how to use it. (The help is similar to what Microsoft Teams pioneered years ago.)

Other Notes

Ctrl with numbers are natively implemented to jump among recent chats. They focus the chat list though, not the message list or Edit box within the chat. Pressing Enter once you get the chat you want will move to the Edit box.

Settings pages name themselves rather verbosely. Example: "Title: Chats Chats Description: Theme, wallpaper, chat settings." Hear that as two columns of information about the page you would open if you choose this: The title of the new page is "Chats," and the description of the new page is "Theme, wallpaper, chat settings," which tells you what to find there.

Alt with numbers to read recent messages would require scripting, as would various other keystrokes that were scripted by Freedom Scientific for the old WhatsApp.