Blog
Insights on desktop app technology trends and SDK adoption
Everyone Checks Desktop Apps for GPL. Almost Nobody Checks the Other 95.7%.
We resolved the licence of 1.36 million dependency instances inside shipped Mac and Windows binaries. Copyleft is 2.8% of what we found. The rest carries an attribution obligation nobody has a process...
Five Years After M1, 1 in 6 Mac Apps Still Ships Intel-Only
We read the shipped binary of every Mac app we track. More than five years after the M1, 16.1% still carry an Intel-only slice and depend on Rosetta 2 to run.
What 16,663 Windows Apps Are Built With
We read the shipped binaries of the Windows apps we track to see what they run. Native C/C++ and .NET split the platform almost evenly, and more apps borrow Microsoft's WebView2 than bundle Electron.
How Tauri Ranks Among Desktop App Runtimes
Tauri now outnumbers Qt and Go native in our corpus of 28,690 desktop apps. Where it actually sits by platform, the size and dependency tradeoff against Electron, and the real open source and closed s...
What 10,778 Mac Apps Are Built With
We scanned the shipped binaries of Mac apps to see what they're built with. Swift and Obj-C still own the Mac at 57.2%, and Tauri now outranks Qt.
The State of Desktop App Development in 2026
We read the shipped binaries of 2,440 macOS apps. What they are built with, how big they are, and how many still have not shipped Apple Silicon support, as of March 2026.
How We Read the SDKs Inside a macOS App Bundle
How Desktop Insights extracts dependency metadata from Electron and native macOS applications, from asar archives to binary string analysis.