Comment by exabrial
6 months ago
You know what would slay right now? A native app.
Not another piece of Electron bloatware, a regular, efficient, fast, snappy, native, app. One that connects to my MCP severs and has local filesystem tools.
Anthropic might fall behind Google/OpenAI eventually, but their Desktop App + MCP/Connectors is unbelievably useful to get real work done.
I haven't used Anthropic's desktop app in months since I don't have access to a Mac anymore, but when I did...it was just an electron app? Did something change?
Not only that, it is the slowest app among all AI apps.
It also has some strange bugs between versions. There was an update a month or two ago that caused the app to be unable to quit normally, and I would have to 'force quit' it. Thankfully it was resolved, but it was unnerving to not be able to close the app normally.
Nope. It is still Electron, and it is not snappy. And I am on an M3 Max MacBook Pro.
I have transitioned off ChatGPT for home use (Google provides me slightly better value in my personal life, as I can pay for a plan that also accommodates my weird photo storage needs) and it’s all Anthropic at work, but I miss the ChatGPT Mac app. I can’t say for certain if it was Electron or not—I never dug into the internals, and it felt very, very fast and “native”.
No, sadly. I wish it were native. Its _terrible_.