John Gruber on why Claude’s Mac app is built on Electron:
[Felix Rieseberg] is one of the principal people responsible for creating Electron[…]. He literally wrote the book on Electron.
Felix Rieseberg, quite obviously, is the answer to the question why Claude is an Electron app.
Having one of Electron’s creators lead the Claude Code project is, of course, significant. But you don’t hire a midwife without expecting a baby. Claude was almost certainly going to be an Electron app no matter who led engineering.
Electron is an industry standard because most big companies are loathe to invest in UI polish. It’s an expense to them, not a way to gain users, so good enough suffices. Claude's primary audience is developers, who pick it based on (1) the models and (2) the app's dev experience. Native UI is a distant consideration, so the app only needs to clear the "good enough" bar.
[Update: Allen Pike nailed this more accurately when he described it as a tradeoff between polished UX and coordinated featurefulness. I wish I'd read his piece earlier, not only because it's an accurate analysis, but also because I wouldn't have unintentionally picked a copycat title.]
Case in point: ChatGPT was off to a good start with their Mac app. Their focus on the consumer market probably motivated them to make it nice. But over the past couple months, bugs have accumulated and been left unfixed. OpenAI's eyes are now on the dev audience prize that Anthropic has a grip on, so their Codex app is evolving rapidly. (It’s an Electron behemoth besting Claude’s 750 MB size to weigh in at a shocking 1.4 GB.)
[Update 2: Just a few days after posting this, the native ChatGPT app has been sent into retirement.]
The result of OpenAI's wayward attention is that I now find the ChatGPT app jankier than Claude and Codex, despite it being native. It pains me to write that. I'm a '90s Apple kid. Native apps are in my blood. But big tech companies have always had an aversion to good taste when it comes to software. Indies have been the ones to lead the way in quality, in fit and finish, in Mac-ness.
When Mac OS X launched, Cocoa gave small teams the power of much larger ones and Mac users ended up with the Delicious Generation. If Cocoa was a shot of caffeine for small teams, AI is a Scarface-sized pile of cocaine.
I know because I’m not a developer and I used it to create a Mac-assed Mac app for myself. (An audio comparison app, like Kaleidoscope but for audio files.) If even I can make something like that, I can't wait to see what actual indie developers make.
Much as I would like Big Tech to stop making Electron clunkers (I'm looking at you too, 1Password), I don't expect a sudden change of heart. Nevertheless, there's suddenly more potential than there's been in years for a resurgence of great Mac apps.