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.
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 was almost certainly going to be an Electron app no matter who led engineering.
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.
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.)
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 my own Mac-assed Mac app. (A free audio comparison app, like Kaleidoscope but for audio files.) There’s suddenly more potential than there’s been in years for a resurgence of native indie apps. Meanwhile, Big Tech will surely keep on making Electron-assed apps.