dev.to
Why Billion-Dollar Companies Ship Electron Apps (And Why ...
Excerpt
## The Developer Complaint The frustration is real. Every time a big tech company releases a new desktop app, it's wrapped in Electron. Slack, Discord, Teams, Spotify, Notion, VS Code, and now OpenAI's Codex. It's everywhere. And developers notice things regular users don't. They see Task Manager showing 8 separate Chrome processes eating RAM. They feel the slight input lag when typing. They notice their laptop fans spinning up just to run what is essentially a chat app. One comment from the thread put it bluntly: "8GB of RAM usage for Codex App is clown-level ridiculous." The argument is simple: these companies have resources. They have some of the smartest engineers in the world. They literally build AI that can write code. Yet they ship apps that bundle an entire Chrome browser just to display a text input field? To developers who care about efficiency, it feels lazy. It feels like the company doesn't respect the user's machine. … ## Here's Where It Gets Messy Here's what made me uncomfortable reading this debate. Both sides are right. Developers are right that Electron apps are wasteful. They consume more memory, more CPU, and more disk space than necessary. When every app does this, your computer gets slower even though the hardware keeps getting better. … ## The VS Code Exception One thing that came up repeatedly: VS Code is also Electron, and people love it. VS Code proves that Electron apps *can* be performant and well-made. Microsoft invested heavily in optimization. The app feels responsive despite being web technology under the hood. So the problem isn't Electron itself. It's that most companies don't put in the same level of effort to optimize their Electron apps. They ship the default configuration and call it done. VS Code is the exception. Most Electron apps are the rule. … The problem isn't Electron. The problem is that Electron makes it too easy to skip optimization. Why spend weeks profiling memory usage when the app already works? Most teams ship the default config and move on to the next feature. VS Code got fast because Microsoft actually put in the work. Most companies don't. Maybe AI will change this. Ironic, isn't it?
Related Pain Points
Poor OS integration and missing platform features
7Electron apps don't integrate well with operating systems because they're essentially web browsers displaying local content. When Electron doesn't support specific OS features, apps using it also won't—for example, Discord lacks screen sharing on Wayland and doesn't support file portals on Flatpak.
Excessive memory and disk space consumption
7Electron apps bundle most of Chromium's codebase, making even basic Hello World applications ~100MB and real-world apps like Discord over 700MB. This excessive resource usage creates performance problems on systems with limited RAM.
Lack of developer optimization effort
6Electron makes it too easy for developers to skip optimization work. Most teams ship the default configuration without profiling memory usage or optimizing performance, leading to bloated apps. Only exceptions like VS Code invest in serious optimization.
Input lag and responsiveness issues in apps
5Users experience noticeable input lag when typing and general sluggishness in Electron apps due to the overhead of running Chromium and multiple processes. This affects user experience even for simple interactions like text input.