Claude's Criminally Bad Electron Mac App Is an Inside Job

7/4/2026 at 1:06:07 AM

> Windows uses Philips head screws, Linux uses hex screws, and MacOS requires Torx — but a hammer works the same way with all screws. That’s Electron.

Heh.

by wiml

7/4/2026 at 2:24:06 AM

Hate on the Claude desktop app on macOS all you want (I personally think it’s fine), but I don’t understand how Gruber can think the ChatGPT app is that good. It’s also…fine, but certainly not special IMO, despite being a native app.

by etothet

7/4/2026 at 4:54:02 AM

I have gemini and chatgpt apps - I think gemini is electron app since i can three finger tap to get word definition. Neither can pinch to zoom, print (i.e. to pdf), run extensions, duplicate tab, etc.

Gemini uses 208 mb vs 171 for chatgpt.

by dzhiurgis

7/4/2026 at 5:42:52 AM

I think it’s incredibly poor form for somebody with the reach and clout of Jon Gruber to be naming and shaming an individual engineer like this. At the very least he could have tried to get the other guy’s side.

by jdlshore

7/4/2026 at 11:44:58 AM

I mainly use mac apps, so I couldn't tell. Is it really that bad?

by jayzer01

7/4/2026 at 12:42:59 AM

Proprietary platform-specific software has had its day. There are performant electron apps, so a better approach would be for AI to entrench the practices that achieve that and focus on high-quality shared/reusable code rather than end up maintaining and testing Win, Mac, Linux, Web and Android variants expressed in different languages/environments. The only plus side there is iOS bans that nature of software entirely so one less platform to support lmao.

by benoau

7/4/2026 at 4:31:09 PM

> Proprietary platform-specific software has had its day.

If the purported benefits of agentic-coding systems are real, it should have been trivial for Anthropic to implement a native macOS application, and sell it as a benefit, no? The whole reason Electron was being pushed is because it reduces development effort, but AI should be able to nullify it based on Anthropic's own messaging.

by the_lucifer

7/4/2026 at 6:06:07 PM

There's still a lot of cognitive overhead adjacent to the code that grows with each platform you're supporting, because you're still having to QA and debug and build and run tests and review code changes in multiple languages with wildly different tooling and dependencies.

AI has to get these native builds perfect for each platform whereas with Electron it's like... write once run anywhere evolves into perfect it once, perfect it everywhere.

by benoau

7/4/2026 at 3:07:44 AM

It’s not just performance but also quality. There are a ton of things which you get out of a native app which Electron developers who aren’t the VSC team never do. It’s almost always obvious who cared about UX more than portability, but the cost differential usually wins out.

Theoretically AI could help with this by making it easier to support multiple interfaces for the same backend functionality but it would run into the challenge of measuring good taste. A good Mac app has lots of interactive aspects which you notice while using it, and would have to be non-trivial to express in ways which a bot could measure.

by acdha

7/4/2026 at 4:33:38 AM

> There are performant electron apps

Somehow I don’t think sucking up 300+Mb of RAM to display 15Kb of text is anywhere within the realm of “performant”, especially when a native app can do the same in 1/30,000 as much RAM.

And with RAM prices to spike another 60-80% before the end of the year, Electron apps are a downright moronic and utterly brain-dead choice, to say nothing about failing to read not only the entire room, but an entire stadium filled to capacity. People are desperate to stretch RAM as far as they can, and Electron is the worst possible choice for that.

I would eagerly categorize any greenfield project using Electron as being absolutely retarded. The mentally incapacitated definition. Because that’s what any such decision-makers are.

I mean, if you truly want a write-once, work everywhere platform without any kind of a required runtime, there is DotNet.

by rekabis

7/4/2026 at 5:00:41 AM

Browsers have been doing this well for over a decade and have tons of superiority.

My favourite that kinda settles this debate is - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48168058

by dzhiurgis