Tauri shows up in 1,543 of the desktop apps we track. That is more than Qt (780) or Go-native (733), the two runtimes often named as the serious cross-platform alternatives. In this snapshot it is a top-five desktop runtime.
We get this number a specific way. We do not count GitHub stars or npm downloads. We read the shipped binary: the executable, its embedded libraries, and its bundle layout. Desktop Insights tracks nearly 26,000 macOS and Windows apps this way (10,778 Mac, 15,106 Windows). When a runtime shows up in these counts, a real product shipped it.
This matters because many "state of" reports are built from source-side signals like repo metadata, package manifests, and developer surveys. Those describe what developers who publish to public registries are doing, and they miss closed-source desktop software, which is most of this corpus. Only 12.2% of our corpus (3,159 apps) is open source, so a source-only method largely misses the closed-source majority. Reading the binary is how you see them.
The overall mix
Here is the runtime breakdown across the full corpus:
- Native C/C++: 27.7% (7,156 apps)
- Native Swift/ObjC: 23.8% (6,156)
- Electron: 16.9% (4,365)
- .NET: 8% (2,070)
- Tauri: 6% (1,543)
- Rust native: 3.2% (815)
- Qt: 3% (780)
- Go native: 2.8% (733)
- Python 2.3% (587), Flutter 2.2% (571), JVM 1.9% (498), Unity 0.7% (176), CEF 0.5% (121), Wails 0.4% (91)
The two native stacks together are 51.5% of all desktop apps (27.7% C/C++ plus 23.8% Swift/ObjC). After years of cross-platform frameworks, most shipped desktop software is still written in the platform's systems or first-party languages. Electron is the third pillar at 16.9%. It is large and entrenched. The movement worth noting sits below it.
Tauri, Qt, and Go
For years the alternative-to-Electron conversation was about Qt, the mature C++ option, and more recently Go desktop toolkits. In this snapshot Tauri has more apps than either. Add Wails (91), which also pairs a native backend with a system webview, and the two together make the lightweight-webview approach a meaningful slice of the corpus. Rust appears more broadly as well, in 815 native apps.
Size is the reason to care. The median Tauri app on macOS is 26.2 MB. The median Electron app is 406.9 MB, about 15 times larger. The platform-wide median Mac app is 59.5 MB. Tauri sits next to native Swift/ObjC (21.1 MB). Electron's dependency counts are heavy-tailed too: a median of 55 bundled dependencies but a mean of 138, because a few apps haul very large trees.
The practical read for a framework vendor or investor: a competitive map anchored on "Electron vs Qt" is describing a different desktop than the one shipping today.
macOS and Windows are two markets
The aggregate hides a split. macOS and Windows have different default runtimes.
On macOS:
- Swift/ObjC: 57.2%
- Electron: 19.4%
- Tauri: 7.7%
- Qt 4.2%, Rust 2.1%, Python 2.1%, Flutter 1.9%, Unity 1.6%, JVM 1.6%, Go 1.3%
On Windows:
- Native C/C++: 47.4%
- Electron: 15.1%
- .NET: 13.7%
- Tauri 4.7%, Go 3.9%, Rust 3.9%, Flutter 2.4%, Python 2.4%, Qt 2.2%, JVM 2.1%
Two things stand out. .NET is a Windows story: 2,069 Windows apps versus 1 on macOS. Whatever ".NET is cross-platform" means for servers, it is not visible in shipped desktop apps here. And Swift/ObjC owns the Mac at 57.2%, while on Windows native C/C++ leads at 47.4% but gives more ground to managed runtimes.
For a dev-tools company this is the line between a Windows-first and a Mac-first roadmap. In this corpus .NET is almost entirely a Windows runtime, and Swift/ObjC is almost entirely a Mac one. The data tells you whose defaults you are competing against.
What to take from this
A few reads fall out of the numbers:
- Framework vendors: Tauri's size advantage over Electron (26.2 MB vs 406.9 MB) is concrete. If you compete with Electron, this is the number to lead with.
- Investors and analysts: this is a market-sizing baseline built from shipped apps and splittable by platform. It is a useful check on theses built from GitHub-popularity proxies, which over-count what is loud and under-count closed-source software.
- Everyone: the desktop is not all web tech now. More than half of it is native, and the platform-native languages lead on each side.
Summary
- Tauri appears in 1,543 apps, more than Qt (780) or Go-native (733).
- Native C/C++ and Swift/ObjC together are 51.5% of the corpus. Native still leads.
- Electron is third at 16.9%, and the median Electron Mac app (406.9 MB) is about 15 times the median Tauri app (26.2 MB).
- macOS and Windows have different defaults: Swift/ObjC on Mac (57.2%), native C/C++ on Windows (47.4%), with .NET almost entirely on Windows (2,069 vs 1).
- All of this comes from reading shipped binaries across nearly 26,000 apps, which is how the count includes the closed-source majority, not just the 12.2% that is open source.
About this data
Figures are from Desktop Insights' June 2026 snapshot of nearly 26,000 macOS and Windows desktop apps. Runtime classification comes from inspecting each shipped binary: executable format, embedded libraries, and bundle layout, not source repositories. The corpus includes 34,617 distinct SDKs and dependencies and 7,822 browsable technologies, with up to 13 years of version history.
Browse the runtime breakdown and filter by platform in the directory, or contact us for the per-app data behind these numbers.