I just wanted a small desktop app.

Every app has a good reason to be heavy. Unfortunately, they all live on the same computer.

A rant about desktop software in 2026: Electron’s excellent tooling and consistent UI, the hidden process cost of WebViews, and why Flutter and native toolkits still leave a gap.

Each company can justify the footprint of its most important app. The user has several important apps open together. This essay argues that Electron’s strong tooling and consistent rendering solve a product-team problem while leaving a shared-computer problem.

Electron supplies Chromium, Node, desktop APIs, and a mature ecosystem. Its predictable web runtime is valuable, but the resource cost accumulates across applications. User reports of excessive memory use need investigation; they do not establish Electron alone as the cause.

Wails, Tauri, and Electrobun offer system-WebView paths. DBX is a concrete Tauri, Vue, and Rust database client. Windows WebView2 uses Chromium; the usual Tauri macOS and Linux paths use WebKit. A small installer or host-process memory number does not account for all runtime processes.

Inspect the app’s process group with Process Explorer on Windows, VS Code’s built-in Process Explorer or code --status, Activity Monitor’s hierarchical view on macOS, or a process tree and per-process PSS on Linux. Private bytes, working set, RSS, and PSS measure different things.

Flutter, Avalonia, MAUI, and platform-native UI offer useful alternatives but different runtime, tooling, platform-support, and consistency trade-offs. The essay ends without a universal recommendation: desktop developers and users still need something better.

Topics

desktop-apps
electron
tauri
wails
electrobun
flutter
native-ui

Sources

Canonical article URL