The problem is that Electron has been using an API clearly marked private by Apple, and they were doing it for purely cosmetic reasons (tweaking window corner masks). Now macOS can’t render these windows efficiently because they’re using the private method, so the window system can’t apply its standard rendering model.
Framework developers need to have a much higher standard for when to use a private API.
But I also think Apple should do more testing with Electron and proactively contribute these fixes. Scanning the framework for private API usage is easily doable for them. If Apple had sent this fix in June when they released the first beta of the new OS, it would have made it into most of these apps.
A trusted source once told me that Mac OS 10 system libraries contain a bunch of shims so that Adobe apps may continue to misuse them the way they did in Mac OS 9. Now that they have a tight grip over the app ecosystem, they don’t even bother to help a major OSS framework that powers thousands of apps make the transition.
In general the Tahoe update has been awful for all my end users that decided to update.
It's not just electron apps that are the issue btw, just yesterday we ran into an issue with Zoom.
It was breaking prompts/popups and by extension the system settings, the Mac app store, iTouch, and a ton of other random stuff was broken in silent and inconsistent ways.
Also all my 8gb users are noticing significantly higher memory usage compared to their previous macOS versions.
It sounds like the issue has already been fixed in Electron, although it will obviously take a while for all app vendors to bump versions.
I'm guessing Zoom might be hitting the same overridden system call that Electron was, although I have no firm information that this is the case.
Regardless, I've just checked my settings to ensure this upgrade won't be installed automatically because I wasn't sure how MacOS behaves with major upgrades, and will probably wait 2 - 3 months before letting Tahoe onto my system to allow everyone else time to get their fixes and upgrades done.
Dev UX is important, and the dev UX of Electron is pretty much unmatched.
If you want people to not use Electron, you'll need to provide an alternative that makes it just as easy to develop sophisticated, platform-independent applications. Otherwise, no amount of complaining about Electron will ever stop devs from using Electron.
I suggest that everyone here stop submitting Feedback Assistant/Radar reports. Let teenagers, college students, adults and old people buy a new Mac, experience the bugs and lack of polish and let it affect Apple's brand, consumer's preferences, and their market behavior. Apple is too big to care about anything other than market consequences. Apple is fully aware that no one likes the Radar system, that no one feels their reports count, they had an executive do a sort-of mea culpa years ago but nothing changed.
My AirPods keep going silent on my new Tahoe Mac and require a disconnect and reconnect. Will I report it? No. (Besides, if you report bugs like that, Apple collects a map of your entire filesystem, every path and filename). Apple shouldn't have fired their QA team. Let them deal with any brand damage, they've earned it. I mean, did Apple really not test their new OS with Slack, Zoom or VSCode? Really? Reckless.
> I suggest that everyone here stop submitting Feedback Assistant/Radar reports.
We need an equivalent of the "Windows UX Taskforce” but for macOS/iOS (it was a website that pointed out and laughed at all the UI/UX flaws in Windows)
They have like ~15% market share. Thats really tiny after all these years. I bet those people are mostly people who have been burned by Windows. What do you expect them to go to? Linux?
I honestly can't figure out why people upgrade to the latest x.0.0 release of macOS. Wait for the x.1.0 : by that time Apple have fixed most of their bugs and software vendors have had time to do their side too.
The real problem is Apple being so stingy with RAM.
I have 192GB of RAM on my (non-Apple) desktop and 96GB of RAM on my (non-Apple) laptop. I have never had memory issues with Electron apps, 200 Chrome tabs open, or pretty much anything, really.
I’m not sure I’ve seen an app plummet in quality as much as 1Password. I used to recommend it to everybody and switched multiple employers to it. Now I actively recommend against it. It wasn’t just abandoning native, somehow they make it worse with every release.
It is sad how far 1Password has fallen. AgileBits used to be a Mac shop and 1Password was a great Mac application. One and a half decades later, they are slow to roll out a fix for what was their initial platform (paying Mac users made them big). Also, it has become insanely buggy. Like autofill breaks for weeks for me every now and then, usually the extension is not able to connect to the 1Password app anymore (rebooting, clearing caches, adding/removing the browser extension, etc. does not help).
I still have a subscription because the whole family uses it and I don't know yet where else to go. There are some native apps, but they are fairly incomplete. Apple passwords would be an option, but I would like to be able to access my passwords on a Linux laptop as well, and Apple passwords does not really have a good backup story.
AgileBits' reaction to criticism is just to wave everything away with a bunch of emoji.
tl;dr: it went from an app that I loved and recommended to everyone to one to one that I would really like to get rid of and never recommend anymore.
I've been using 1P since version 6 and I do miss the native app and I was sceptical of the transition to Electron. But for the most part it has been pretty decent, it does its thing and gets out of my way for the most part, haven't felt any performance regression (even the one stated in this post). I don't even know if/what things are getting worse every release.
Truly sad, if I remember they were still migrating to SwiftUI for their iOS app.
I have an app which almost shares the same SwiftUI codebase with iOS and macOS, and I am a one-man dev. If I can do it, I believe these million dollar company can also.
SwiftUI is still broken for any non-simple apps, almost a decade after its introduction. Completely unacceptable for big apps. Look at OmniFocus, who inexplicably became early-adopters of it, and it's had a bunch of UI glitches and inconsistent behavior requiring app restart (like you select one list item, but the inspector shows you details for another list item) ever since.
Apple only has itself to blame for Electron's popularity.
I am a one-man dev. If I can do it, I believe these million dollar company can also
They could if they wanted to. Heck, they have so many developers and money, they could even maintain a separate Cocoa app. But in all these cases, they'd rather externalize cost to the user.
Sadly, for many of these Electron apps, it would probably be better to install the iOS app, but most vendors disable that option.
> I have an app which almost shares the same SwiftUI codebase with iOS and macOS, and I am a one-man dev.
How do you crusade through Apple's appalling [lack of] documentation and dumb error messages and all the weird ＊magic＊ involved in wrangling an imperative language into a declarative framework?
5 years after SwiftUI's release I still struggle to build a simple photo viewer or expense tracker.
> Sadly, for many of these Electron apps, it would probably be better to install the iOS app, but most vendors disable that option.
If companies enabled the flag to let users install their iOS apps on Mac, it would be a better world, but some asinine companies refuse to, and Apple has to respect the dev's decision, however dumb it may be. I love how Apple worked around that by making iPhone Mirroring, which is a win for users. I actually use that over the desktop website/Electron crap for some apps. But how long before companies force Apple to remove that feature, like they did with removing an easy way to "Disable Javascript" from Safari?
There's a better way - you can find all apps you really should care about, i.e., the ones you have installed locally - run the last script in a comment of the Gist [0].
Update: It appears that the author of shamelectron was influenced by the same Gist [1].
Thanks for the mention! Yes, I was the person who found the original bug in electron and made the PR to get it fixed. Now doing my due diligence of (nicely) asking companies to update their versions :)
What is that? Like 32x >100MB junk overhead per app? ~4GiB gone from the disk just to hold the same broken copy of some framework/library? It's quite the insanity, isn't it?
If there was one copy of that electron (e.g. installed to /Library somewhere) which all apps would simply use then you only would need to update one copy. Less disk space wasted. All apps fixed in one go.
Back in the old days on the Commodore Amiga we would just do that… install some .library to SYS:Libs/ first if a program required it. It's not like this process was so complicated nobody could do it, right?
The number of major companies doing half-assed javascript bullshit instead of proper native macOS apps is ridiculous. This did remind me to go cancel 1Password though, something I'd been meaning to do since they switched _to_ electron...
Hey - "Shame" is somewhat stronger than what I would have said but I also had similar feelings considering it was from DHH's company. And not just for outdated Electron, but for shipping Electron in the first place. For some reason I always felt DHH will write native apps for his company :)
I have absolutely lost hope from Dropbox and I am actively looking for a replacement.
BitWarden using Electron is just unfortunate and it is sluggish.
What happened to 1Password (don't use it, never did) and their Apple only-great-native-software trope I used to hear? Cost cutting?
Electron is the reason I am still using Overcast and not Pocket Casts even though it's FOSS.
Proton Mail - this app is such a mess!
Simplenote - moved away long back! When did Electron come into it? It was native, wasn't it?
If you go back far enough, they just don't have the issue at all! Running your "detect using cornerMask" script from another comment in this post, I have an app (https://www.haikuanimator.com/) that shows up green… because it's using Electron 2.0.8!
I see, sorry to waste your time. I thought the list was meant to be informational for people to assess which applications were problematic. I didn't realize it was more of a call to action.
Either solution is an improvement over the laggy electron app. Using Safari's web app feature on discord's website feels markedly better than trying to use their "native" app.
I just reformatted my MacBook and I was hesitant to reinstall the discord app because of how terrible it is. That sounds like a good compromise I never thought of considering discord is more of a windows PC thing for me. Thanks.
People keep saying they need Electron because keeping up with the system's native web view is impossible yet a bunch of these apps have web versions that work perfectly fine (or as you say, even better) in Safari
The issue is already fixed upstream in electron, it was due to the overriding of an internal/undocumented system function behaving differently by the nature of just being overridden at all (the function body was empty).
Readit News
Framework developers need to have a much higher standard for when to use a private API.
But I also think Apple should do more testing with Electron and proactively contribute these fixes. Scanning the framework for private API usage is easily doable for them. If Apple had sent this fix in June when they released the first beta of the new OS, it would have made it into most of these apps.
At some point, the current situation is to be expected. It’s ok. Electron apps will be fixed and it will be all right.
It's not just electron apps that are the issue btw, just yesterday we ran into an issue with Zoom.
It was breaking prompts/popups and by extension the system settings, the Mac app store, iTouch, and a ton of other random stuff was broken in silent and inconsistent ways.
Also all my 8gb users are noticing significantly higher memory usage compared to their previous macOS versions.
Dead Comment
It sounds like the issue has already been fixed in Electron, although it will obviously take a while for all app vendors to bump versions.
I'm guessing Zoom might be hitting the same overridden system call that Electron was, although I have no firm information that this is the case.
Regardless, I've just checked my settings to ensure this upgrade won't be installed automatically because I wasn't sure how MacOS behaves with major upgrades, and will probably wait 2 - 3 months before letting Tahoe onto my system to allow everyone else time to get their fixes and upgrades done.
Electron ""apps"" were are and will always be the issue.
Don't bundle a whole freakin web browser and ravish my battery and RAM just to show me a damn text box.
A text box that won't even have all the built-in OS features or accessibility.
Downvote this to hell but Electron is a crutch for lazy Frankensteins looking for lightning to revive a monster that should have stayed dead.
If you want people to not use Electron, you'll need to provide an alternative that makes it just as easy to develop sophisticated, platform-independent applications. Otherwise, no amount of complaining about Electron will ever stop devs from using Electron.
Most of my electron apps fully packaged are less than 100mb.
My AirPods keep going silent on my new Tahoe Mac and require a disconnect and reconnect. Will I report it? No. (Besides, if you report bugs like that, Apple collects a map of your entire filesystem, every path and filename). Apple shouldn't have fired their QA team. Let them deal with any brand damage, they've earned it. I mean, did Apple really not test their new OS with Slack, Zoom or VSCode? Really? Reckless.
We need an equivalent of the "Windows UX Taskforce” but for macOS/iOS (it was a website that pointed out and laughed at all the UI/UX flaws in Windows)
I’d argue this applies to a very large proportion of companies out there, they don’t have to be huge to suffer from this affliction.
I have 192GB of RAM on my (non-Apple) desktop and 96GB of RAM on my (non-Apple) laptop. I have never had memory issues with Electron apps, 200 Chrome tabs open, or pretty much anything, really.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/02/macos_26_electron_slo...
I still have a subscription because the whole family uses it and I don't know yet where else to go. There are some native apps, but they are fairly incomplete. Apple passwords would be an option, but I would like to be able to access my passwords on a Linux laptop as well, and Apple passwords does not really have a good backup story.
AgileBits' reaction to criticism is just to wave everything away with a bunch of emoji.
tl;dr: it went from an app that I loved and recommended to everyone to one to one that I would really like to get rid of and never recommend anymore.
I have an app which almost shares the same SwiftUI codebase with iOS and macOS, and I am a one-man dev. If I can do it, I believe these million dollar company can also.
Apple only has itself to blame for Electron's popularity.
They could if they wanted to. Heck, they have so many developers and money, they could even maintain a separate Cocoa app. But in all these cases, they'd rather externalize cost to the user.
Sadly, for many of these Electron apps, it would probably be better to install the iOS app, but most vendors disable that option.
How do you crusade through Apple's appalling [lack of] documentation and dumb error messages and all the weird ＊magic＊ involved in wrangling an imperative language into a declarative framework?
5 years after SwiftUI's release I still struggle to build a simple photo viewer or expense tracker.
> Sadly, for many of these Electron apps, it would probably be better to install the iOS app, but most vendors disable that option.
If companies enabled the flag to let users install their iOS apps on Mac, it would be a better world, but some asinine companies refuse to, and Apple has to respect the dev's decision, however dumb it may be. I love how Apple worked around that by making iPhone Mirroring, which is a win for users. I actually use that over the desktop website/Electron crap for some apps. But how long before companies force Apple to remove that feature, like they did with removing an easy way to "Disable Javascript" from Safari?
Update: It appears that the author of shamelectron was influenced by the same Gist [1].
[0]: https://gist.github.com/tkafka/e3eb63a5ec448e9be6701bfd1f1b1...
[1]: https://gist.github.com/tkafka/e3eb63a5ec448e9be6701bfd1f1b1...
* 1Password.app
* Bruno.app
* Claude.app (oh noes!)
* Cursor.app
* Docker.app
* Dropbox Dash.app
* Dropbox.app
* Element.app
* GitKraken.app
* Graphite.app
* HEY.app (shame on DHH!)
* Keeper Password Manager.app (it's not just 1Password)
* Keybase.app
* Kiro.app (come on, AWS!)
* Ledger Live.app (crypto seems to lag behind Web 2.0 still!)
* Loom.app
* Notion Calendar.app
* Notion Mail.app
* Notion.app
* Pocket Casts.app
* Podman Desktop.app
* Proton Mail.app
* Proton Pass.app (all major password manager apps are in trouble)
* Redis Insight.app
* Sculptor.app
* Simplenote.app (shame on photomatt!)
* Texts.app (although it's possibly now replaced by Beeper)
* Tonkeeper.app
* Windsurf - Next.app
* WorkFlowy.app
* itch.app
* krisp.app
If there was one copy of that electron (e.g. installed to /Library somewhere) which all apps would simply use then you only would need to update one copy. Less disk space wasted. All apps fixed in one go.
Back in the old days on the Commodore Amiga we would just do that… install some .library to SYS:Libs/ first if a program required it. It's not like this process was so complicated nobody could do it, right?
Deleted Comment
I have absolutely lost hope from Dropbox and I am actively looking for a replacement.
BitWarden using Electron is just unfortunate and it is sluggish.
What happened to 1Password (don't use it, never did) and their Apple only-great-native-software trope I used to hear? Cost cutting?
Electron is the reason I am still using Overcast and not Pocket Casts even though it's FOSS.
Proton Mail - this app is such a mess!
Simplenote - moved away long back! When did Electron come into it? It was native, wasn't it?
Deleted Comment
There are much better reasons to shame DHH.
Detect Electron apps on Mac that hasn't been updated to fix the system wide lag - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45437112 - Oct 2025 (114 comments)
OpenMTP.app (Electron 18.3.15)
DiffusionBee.app (Electron 13.6.9)