Electron apps vs. native Mac apps: what your users can tell

Open Activity Monitor on a Mac running Slack, Discord, and Notion. You'll find three separate copies of Chromium, each holding half a gigabyte, each spinning up its own renderer and GPU process. That's what Electron is: a full browser bundled with your app, one per app.

It's a reasonable engineering shortcut. It's a poor product decision for anything people keep open all day.

What users notice

They can't name Electron, but they feel it.

• Launch time. A native Mac app opens in under a second. An Electron app boots a browser first.
• Memory. 400 to 800 MB idle is normal for Electron. A native app doing the same job sits at 40 to 80.
• Battery. Chromium renders on a timer. A SwiftUI app renders when something changes.
• Text and scrolling. Rubber-band scrolling, inertial trackpad gestures, subpixel text rendering, and the system's font smoothing all come free in native apps. Electron approximates each one.
• Keyboard shortcuts and menus. Native apps get the menu bar, Services, Shortcuts, and every system shortcut by default. Electron apps rebuild these by hand and always miss a few.
• Accessibility. VoiceOver, Full Keyboard Access, and Increase Contrast work with AppKit and SwiftUI controls out of the box. Web views need every element labeled manually.

Why teams choose it anyway

One codebase for Mac, Windows, and Linux. A web team that already knows React. No Swift on staff. Those are real reasons, and for an internal tool nobody keeps open past lunch, they win.

For a product people live in, they don't. The Mac market is disproportionately made of people who care about how software feels, and they'll notice.

The cost argument has flipped

The old math: a native Mac app costs a second team and a second codebase. That's no longer true.

SwiftUI runs on iPhone, iPad, and Mac from one codebase. A builder working with modern tooling ships a native Mac app in the same two weeks a web team would spend wrapping their React app in Electron and debugging the tray icon.

Every Mac app we've shipped is native SwiftUI. They launch instantly, idle light, and get the menu bar, Shortcuts, and Spotlight integration for free.

When to still use a web view

Rendering HTML content the user created, like an email client showing a message. Embedding a third-party editor you can't replace. A genuinely cross-platform internal tool with no Mac-first audience.

For everything else, build it native. It's cheaper than it was, and your users can tell the difference even when they can't say why.