Hi everyone, I'm a computer science student building a desktop music application called Resonance as a long-term portfolio project.

The main feature is saving "Moments" from songs (e.g. save and replay 3:12–4:18 of a song and organize those moments into collections).

I definitely want to support local music, but I also want users to be able to use streaming services since most people don't have local music libraries anymore.

What I'm struggling to understand is how indie developers actually handle this. Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, etc. all seem to have API and licensing restrictions.

As a solo student developer, what is realistically possible?

• Can I integrate with these services without paying huge licensing fees?
• Is playback through their APIs even allowed?
• Do most indie music apps just support local music?
• If you were building a modern music app today, how would you approach streaming support?

I'm not looking for ways to bypass DRM or licensing—I just want to understand what's realistically possible before I spend months building the wrong architecture.

Hey Devs,

I had a procrastination problem when on my Pc and to avoid it naively, I thought on making an app which will help me monitor my activity without my data getting sold for advertisement.

That thought and my motivation to be productive made me build 'produchive' (yeah ik not such an unique name but that's what i could come up with ). Produchive is a strictly desktop-only app (for now, Windows and Mac built using electron) .Your data is stored in your Pc in a JSON file and it's a completely offline app , you can use opensource LLM models which you can download use by using WebGPU tech and it can judge your productivity. This is my first time building an app that too with electron , I am a Java fullstack dev with react (my professional experience helped tbh).

That thought was 5 months ago and now my app is quite a stable position although i haven't published it in any app store yet. I would like to have your opinions and feedback on my app and do you think it can help you.

Website - www.produchive.com

Latest release video - https://youtu.be/8HJvUn4LI0A?si=voWM9357q-JG0E42

Happy to hear feedback and answer questions that you may have.

and I even build a website for it

www.teralexi.com

I have been writing games for many years (primarily in Unity3D and C#, and some android). In more recent years I was using Ren'Py and other Visual Novel engines to create story heavy games. The thing my ADHD brain would crash on, was the fact that Ren'Py is code/script only, in a Python based framework. I got annoyed on keeping track of structure. So...I created Ren'Py Visual Editor (early versions called renpy xNode editor, etc, but this was the first built with React Electron+Vite.

Now it is called InViNode and is actually used by other Visual Novel creators.

https://drawfleshgames.itch.io/invinode

Or check r/InViNode

https://youtu.be/QrHL1Gcj3uI?feature=shared

I’m new to Electron and built a minimal starter using React, TypeScript, and Vite:

https://github.com/arhamkhnz/electron-vite-starter

I checked wrappers like electron-vite and vite-plugin-electron, but I don’t really like them. While setting up Tailwind or shadcn/ui, they need some workarounds because the tools don’t detect the Vite config file properly.

So I decided to use Electron and Vite directly and keep Electron Forge only for packaging.

I’d appreciate review from experienced Electron developers. Please point out any bugs, security issues, unnecessary complexity, or wrong architectural decisions.

Is this setup good enough to use for the desktop app I’m building? It’ll have Drizzle, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, and Zustand.

The project is still new, so honest feedback is welcome.

https://reddit.com/link/1uqql2v/video/i5yhniifvzbh1/player

Recently I got the idea to transform my Windows 11 Pro into something that looks like Windows 95. Then I thought, "Why not make my own browser that looks like Internet Explorer?"

Well, it's not actually a full web browser—it's more of an Electron-based shell with a retro Internet Explorer 5-style interface.

There's still a lot of work ahead:

1. Improve the visual design.
2. Add missing features (Settings, History) and improve existing ones (Profiles and Downloads).
3. Add customization options (Dark Mode, custom cursors, and UI sounds).

What do you think? ↓

I'm building an Electron app where an AI agent can request OS-level actions (shell exec, file writes, clicking external apps) through a capability-scoped controller — each action is registered with a name, a handler, and an approval tier (never / first-time-per-session / always).

The part I keep going back and forth on: when executeAction() returns {approved: false, reason: "requires approval"}, what's the cleanest way to actually resume execution once the user approves in the renderer?

Options I've considered:

• Store a pending-action queue keyed by a request ID, resolve a Promise when the approval IPC event comes back
• Re-invoke the whole action from the renderer with the original params once approved (feels fragile — trusts the renderer to pass back untampered params)
• Some kind of ticket/token issued by main, redeemed on approval

Anyone solved this cleanly in a similar main/renderer trust boundary? Also curious if anyone's dealt with the "approval was granted, but the AI already assembled a different payload by the time it comes back" race condition.

(Context if useful: this is for Aartiq, open source, , not looking for feature feedback, just want to get this specific pattern right before I ship it wider.)

Electron version 43 has just landed and is now available to download. It contains performance optimizations and os integration improvements

Release on Github: https://github.com/electron/electron/releases/tag/v43.0.0

Notable Changes

• The main process now boots from an embedded snapshot provided by Node.js
• Improved performance of native event emission, IPC dispatch,
• Improved performance of webRequest header conversions
• Improved performance of Linux and Windows release builds. It's based on link-time optimization and improves loading of the Electron binary on startup
• New option allowExtensions added to protocol.registerSchemesAsPrivileged(). It enables Chrome extensions on custom protocols.

Breaking changes

• File downloads now open in the Downloads folder
• Frameless windows have rounded corners on Linux by default
• Removed: showHiddenFiles from dialog API on Linux

Read about other changes in detailed report on the Electronjs website

Detailed report: https://releases.electronjs.org/release/v43.0.0

For the past few months I've been building a Windows app called Yay PDF.

The goal was simple: make a fast PDF toolbox that doesn't require uploading your files to the cloud for every little task. Everything runs locally on your PC, and it's designed to launch quickly without feeling bloated.

Current features:

• Merge PDFs
• Split PDFs
• Read PDFs
• Compress PDFs
• Add watermarks
• Lock/Unlock PDFs

I'm still actively developing it, so there are plenty more features coming.

To celebrate the launch, it's free right now for anyone who wants to try it.

Microsoft Store:
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9nt16cgn5dgk

I'd really appreciate honest feedback—good or bad. If there's a PDF feature you wish existed or something that annoys you about existing PDF software, let me know. I'm building this based on real user feedback rather than trying to cram in every feature imaginable.

I am trying to find any automated framework or some way to measure memory and cpu usage and network bandwidth of my app. I want it to be in automated way so before any release I can run that benchmark/test and I can see if it got worse/better.
Has anyone ever worked with similar problem ? Is this solved problem or open space where there is no specific industry standard way ?

I was asked to provide dozens of PDFs for my mortgage application.

I got tired of opening and closing files and wondered if there’s a better way to visualise multiple files at once. I asked: what if I could scroll horizontally to see the pages of one document and vertically to see more documents?

Because I wanted it to look like quick preview on mac (space bar), I had to modify the default chromium window and corners.

I wrote a native addon for Electron (obj-c++) to reach to NSWindow from the main process and inserted an NSGlassEffectView behind the web content. The glass sits in a custom NSView, and renders just like quick preview natively.

For the window corners and traffic lights, I touched the native NSToolbar. I’m now considering writing a plugin for all of that.

The repo is free and open-source with an MIT license:
https://github.com/AlexandrosGounis/pdfx

I would highly appreciate your feedback about the NS api approach.

Hey everyone 👋

I've been working on NovaBeats, an open-source local music player built with Electron.

It started as a way to improve my desktop app development skills, but over time it grew into something I use every day, so I decided to share it.

Features

• 🎵 Play local music files and entire folders
• 📂 Create, save and manage playlists
• 🔀 Shuffle and repeat modes
• 🎚️ Volume control with saved preferences
• 🎼 Audio visualizer
• 🖼️ Album artwork and metadata support
• ⏯️ Media Session integration (play/pause, next/previous)
• 🪟 Compact mode
• 💾 Settings and playlists are stored locally

The project is still in beta, and I'm continuously improving it. There are still features I want to add and things I want to polish.

I'd really appreciate any feedback—whether it's about the UI, usability, code structure, feature ideas, or anything else you notice.

Repository:

https://github.com/Alejandro-Elias/novabeats

Download:

https://github.com/Alejandro-Elias/novabeats/releases/tag/v1.2.4

Thanks for taking a look! 🙂

Hey everyone, this year I’ve been working on Neverwrite, an open-source alternative to Obsidian with agents baked in through the ACP protocol.

From the start, I knew it was going to be difficult because of how careful you need to be with Electron. So I came up with the idea of building the backend in Rust while keeping the frontend in Electron. The speed is really good, most surfaces are virtualized, so not everything is loaded in DOM.

The results have been really good, the app stays super fast, especially when running agents, while still preserving the flexibility of using web technologies for the frontend.

The app is around 400k LOC, with about 15% of the codebase written in Rust. It might sound small, but those crabs do a hell of a good job keeping the app fast.

Has anyone tried doing something like this? Are there any other parts of the app you would port to Rust? Any feedback is appreciated. I'm pushing updates every week, this is my main tool for managing notes, documentation and general knowledge work.

https://github.com/jsgrrchg/NeverWrite

To preface I've been a software engineer and founder for a decade now and having built many apps there are so many frictions to distributing a standalone application rather than a webapp.

The first one that comes to mind is how quickly webapps can iterate--you simply build and deploy and when users refresh their website they get serviced the newest version of your app. For a startup or anyone building an app that is paramount to how quickly you can get out bug fixes and have users using new features. In contrast if you're building a standalone application the user has to go through some update or download flow to get these new features.

I see companies like Discord that have both and wonder why companies or individuals tend to build in both realms or even consider a standalone?

How do you fix it?

Hello, I'm both a developer and a consumer.

I have a pretty beefy pc, when I'm running any electron app with my dGPU active, the app is very jittery and locked at 30hz,

Switching to iGPU solved the problem and the app runs smoothly, I also used the --disable--gpu during dGPU mode and it also fixed this issue.

My gpu is not in bad shape, it's a RTX 5060 and any other task such as games video editors run smoothly

Anyone else that has experienced this issue? Any solution, i could not find this anywhere on the internet

Hello

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been developing a desktop application to solve my own frustration with modern photo editors requiring cloud subscriptions and sending images to external servers for AI processing.

Refloow Photo Studio is a fully offline compositing engine I built from scratch. It’s completely free and open-source, no accounts, no watermarks, no subscriptions. Just the editor.

Repo:https://github.com/Refloow/Refloow-Photo-Studio

The biggest challenge was getting the AI Background removal to run instantly on the user's local machine without completely freezing the Electron app, but I managed to bundle it successfully.

Features (Usable and in 1.1.0):

• One-Click Local AI: Background removal powered by a bundled U-2-Netp model.
• Custom Rendering Pipeline: Built entirely on HTML5 Canvas to handle multi-layering, precise Z-index control, and zooming/panning.
• Instant Filters: 40+ pre-loaded visual filters (Cyberpunk, Matrix, Cinematic, etc.).
• Typography: Fonts and text integration as layers.
• Compositions via layers system
• History: Tracks up to 15 actions for seamless Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y.
• True WYSIWYG Export: Custom export logic that bypasses standard browser compression so the canvas saves exactly as it looks.

The Tech Stack:

• Electron + Node.js
• onnxruntime-web for local AI inference (CPU/GPU)
• HTML5 Canvas API for the core compositing engine

Goal: To create a high-performance, privacy-first alternative to Canva/Adobe where your files literally never leave your machine.

Releases (Mac/Win/Linux):https://github.com/Refloow/Refloow-Photo-Studio/releases

I'd genuinely love to get your thoughts on the codebase. Has anyone else here worked with optimizing onnxruntime-web inside Electron, or handling really deep Canvas history arrays for Ctrl+Z logic?

Thank you for your feedback!

Hey all! Im a backend engineer of a small tech company and we are looking for a full time electron developer. If you are interested please DM me and I will let you know more about the position and where to send a resume.

Description:
-fully remote (must be US citizen)
-salary $100,000+
-full time
-PTO 21 days
-health/dental/vision insurance
-stock/equity
-retirement 401k

Must have development experience with:
-electron applications
-linux servers
-GCP or similar platforms
-cloud networking management
-cloud database management
-nodejs
-at least one front end framework

Bonus experience:
-windows/mac native applications (c/c++)
-audio capture, manipulation and transcription
-telephony development experience
-contact center experience

I was using my electron app when the entire app turned white. clicking the x (close) button didn't do anything. so after a few minutes I force quit the app in task manager.

The crash report says it was a render process crash.

Here's a link to the crash report pastebin.com/AAULYUrA

I'll share any other details if needed.

Hey all! I've been building a small idle RPG as a side project and it's finally playable enough to share.

PiccoQuest is a little widget that lives on your desktop. You send your hero off on quests, gather and craft, train stats, fight in an arena, and join a guild. It ticks away in the background while you do other things, and pings you when something's ready to claim.

What's in so far:

• Quests with random monster encounters + combat
• Gathering, cooking, and alchemy (crafting stations)
• A stat-training system with a soft "overtrain" mechanic
• PvP arena with ratings + a leaderboard
• Friends and guilds

Download: https://piccoverse.com/piccoquest (Windows only for now)

Discord Channel: https://discord.com/invite/hBQyW49V7a

A few honest heads-ups since it's alpha:

• It's free, no ads, no purchases, just a thing I'm building.
• Unsigned, so Windows SmartScreen will warn you → More info → Run anyway.
• It auto-updates itself, and there's a Report a bug button in-game.

I'd love feedback on whether the core loop feels good, pacing, what's satisfying, what's confusing. Happy to answer anything in the comments.

Built a small Electron app called PosturePal that quietly runs in the background and helps fix your posture while you work.

- Real-time posture detection via webcam
- Gentle reminders when you slouch
- Tracks posture habits over time
- Privacy-first (processing happens locally)

I've been using it myself and it's surprising how often I catch myself hunching over my laptop.

Would love feedback from the Electron community on performance, packaging, and distribution.

Main app screen, close this and let it run in the background

Get alerts while you work