20 Native macOS Apps That Replaced My Electron Bloat for Good
I opened Activity Monitor last year on a Thursday afternoon, just to check something quick. Slack was sitting at 780MB. Discord was at 410MB. Notion was at 490MB. Spotify was lurking at 280MB. I had four apps open — and they'd already consumed nearly 2GB of RAM before I'd written a single line of code. My MacBook Pro fan was humming like it was rendering a film. The battery had dropped 18% in…
In a recent discovery, a reporter noticed the excessive RAM consumption by popular native macOS apps such as Slack, Discord, Notion, and Spotify. These apps were built using Electron, a framework that combines web technologies with desktop app functionality. This results in multiple Chromium instances running simultaneously, each with its own memory heap and resources, leading to higher memory usage and slower performance.
The reporter then began searching for alternative native applications that provided similar functionality but with better performance and efficiency. Apps like Mimestream, Zed, Craft, and Reeder proved to be faster, lighter, and more integrated with macOS than their Electron counterparts.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
