I started noticing my Macbook Pro M1 Pro's battery depleting faster and faster. And then noticed it is getting hot which I thought was okay because I'm a hardcore developer and run a heavy workload locally.
But this kept happening when I wasn't running any coding workloads. That's when I realized damn it, there must be some bad actor jacking the CPU usage. Coming from an Intel Macbook Air to a Macbook Pro M1 Pro chip made me forget about performance issues and battery issues. How spoilt was I?
Turns out, one "Service Extension" is the culprit. Digging deeper revealed it was the WhatsApp Native App for MacOS (beta) hogging on the CPU (96%) consistently for hours and hours. WhatsApp has a desktop App but the generally available version is not native, it is just an electron wrapper. They are building a native Mac app, the one which I was using. The beta version has this massive bug (I'm on the latest version). Interestingly, WhatsApp was closed (not quit), but still, the bug occurred. In fact, my Macbook's lid was closed - it should have gone to sleep! So, I promptly deleted the application and data folders from Library/Containers. Everything looks good!!
This is so so strange to find after seeing this recent Tweet about WhatsApp using Mic in the background on Android devices.
I wish developers are a bit more aware while developing large-scale applications. On this note, I decided to write more frequently about the product issues I find commonly in day-to-day usage. This has been on my mind for quite some time, but today's the day.
I won't be sending out a newsletter (not a fan). You can follow me on Twitter to know about the latest Glitches that I keep finding.
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