Porting our Electron app to Tauri

Our productivity tracker started life as an Electron app. It worked, but it shipped a whole Chromium runtime to do a job that mostly runs quietly in the background. The port to Tauri cut the install size by about 90% and left us with a Rust backend that’s easier to trust with always-on tracking.

Why we moved

Electron was the fast way to ship v1: one codebase, web tech, done. But for a tool that sits in the tray all day, the costs compounded:

• Install size. Hundreds of megabytes for an app whose UI is open a few minutes a day.
• Memory. A full browser process for a background tracker is a bad trade.
• Trust. A privacy-focused tracker should feel light, not like it’s hauling a browser around.

What the port looked like

Tauri keeps the webview UI, so most of the front end came across intact. The real work was the backend: the Node main process became Rust, and the IPC surface between UI and core got redesigned rather than translated one-to-one.

Sharp edges

Not everything was free. Platform webviews differ in ways bundled Chromium never did, and some Node-ecosystem conveniences don’t have drop-in Rust equivalents. More on the specifics in a follow-up.

Was it worth it?

Yes. Same UI, ~90% smaller install, three platforms, and a core language that matches how much we ask users to trust this app.