DEV Community: Mohsen Karimi

New to Mac? Skip the Bloat — Start With These Native Apps

Mohsen Karimi — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:37:02 +0000

You just got a Mac. Maybe you switched from Windows. Maybe it's your first laptop. Maybe someone handed you a used MacBook and said "good luck."

The first thing you'll do is go looking for apps. And the first thing the internet will tell you is to install Notion, Slack, Discord, and a dozen other tools you recognize from other people's screens.

Don't. Not yet.

Before you load your Mac with apps that will quietly eat your RAM, drain your battery, and make your fans run like a hairdryer — it's worth spending ten minutes understanding what makes a Mac app actually good. Because Mac apps aren't all equal. Not even close.

What "Native" Means — and Why It Matters to You

You'll see the word "native" thrown around a lot in Mac circles. Here's what it actually means in plain terms.

Some apps are built specifically for macOS — written in Apple's own programming languages (Swift, SwiftUI), following Apple's design guidelines, using macOS's own features directly. These apps feel light, open instantly, and behave exactly like your Mac expects.

Other apps — especially big-name ones — are built using a framework called Electron. Electron lets developers write one app for every platform at once (Mac, Windows, Linux) without learning anything platform-specific. The catch: every Electron app is secretly a web browser. It bundles a full copy of Chrome inside it, whether you asked for Chrome or not.

This is why Slack uses 500–800MB of RAM. This is why opening five common apps can drain your battery in two hours. This is why some apps feel like they're running on your Mac rather than as part of it.

Native apps don't have this problem. A well-built native app uses less memory than a single browser tab. It respects your Mac's power management. It works with system features like Spotlight, Notification Center, Quick Look, and drag-and-drop the way Apple intended.

For a new Mac user, the practical difference is simple: native apps feel fast and light. Everything else feels like you're running Chrome one more time.

Your Starter Pack: 8 Apps to Install First

These are the apps you'll thank yourself for installing in week one. All of them are free or have free tiers. All of them are native.

1. Rectangle — Window Management

Free, Open Source · rectangleapp.com

Here's something that will surprise you about macOS: it doesn't snap windows to the sides of your screen by default. On Windows, you can drag a window to the edge and it fills half the screen. On Mac, you can't — not without a tool.

Rectangle fixes this immediately.

Install it, and you'll have keyboard shortcuts to snap any window left, right, full screen, or into quarters. Press ⌃⌥← and your window fills the left half. ⌃⌥→ fills the right half. It works every time, it's invisible when you're not using it, and it uses almost no memory.

You'll use this every single day. It's the first app I tell every new Mac user to install.

2. Maccy — Clipboard History

Free, Open Source · github.com/p0deje/Maccy

macOS only remembers one thing you've copied. Copy something new and the old thing is gone forever — unless you have Maccy.

Maccy lives in your menu bar and silently saves everything you copy: text, URLs, code, anything. When you need something you copied earlier, press ⇧⌘C and a small window appears with your full clipboard history. Search it, click the item you need, and it's back in your clipboard.

This sounds minor until the first time you copy a URL, accidentally overwrite it, and realize you can pull it back instantly instead of hunting for it again. After that it becomes indispensable.

3. IINA — Video Player

Free, Open Source · iina.io

macOS comes with QuickTime Player, which is fine for basic playback but can't handle a lot of common video formats — MKV, AVI, HEVC, subtitles with external files, and so on.

IINA plays everything. It's built natively for macOS, looks beautiful, integrates with Touch Bar and macOS media controls, and the whole app is smaller than a single Electron app's Chrome bundle. Under 50MB.

Replace QuickTime as your default video player and stop thinking about video formats.

4. AppCleaner — Proper Uninstalling

Free · freemacsoft.net/appcleaner

On macOS, dragging an app to the Trash doesn't fully uninstall it. The .app file goes away, but the app usually leaves behind preference files, caches, support files, and sometimes launch agents scattered across your Library folders.

AppCleaner fixes this. Drag any app onto AppCleaner (or drop apps into it), and it finds every file that app has ever left behind. One click removes all of it cleanly.

Especially useful when you're trying apps and deleting the ones you don't like. Use this instead of just dragging to Trash.

5. The Unarchiver — Open Any Archive

Free · theunarchiver.com

macOS can open .zip files natively. Everything else — .rar, .7z, .tar.gz, .iso, and dozens of other formats — requires a tool.

The Unarchiver handles all of it. Set it as your default and you'll never see an "unsupported format" error. It's a tiny, native app that does exactly one job and does it perfectly.

6. Raycast — Your Command Center

Freemium · raycast.com

macOS has Spotlight (⌘Space) for searching files and launching apps. Raycast is what Spotlight would be if Apple had spent the last five years building it seriously.

With Raycast you can:

Launch any app by typing a few letters
Search and open files instantly
Look up clipboard history (pairs nicely with Maccy — or replaces it)
Convert units, check timezones, do quick math
Run shortcuts and automations
Control dozens of apps without switching to them

The free tier is genuinely excellent. This is the app that makes everything else on your Mac feel faster.

7. Bear — Notes That Actually Feel Good

Freemium · bear.app

Apple Notes is fine. But if you want a notes app that feels like it was designed with care — one that supports Markdown, has a beautiful interface, lets you tag notes instead of shoving them into folders, and opens instantly — Bear is the answer.

The free tier lets you create and read notes on Mac. The paid tier adds syncing with iPhone and iPad. If you're an Apple ecosystem user, Bear is the note-taking app most worth paying for.

8. Shottr — Screenshots Done Right

Free · shottr.cc

macOS has built-in screenshot tools (⌘⇧3 for full screen, ⌘⇧4 for selection). They work, but they're basic.

Shottr adds annotation tools, pixel ruler, color picker, blur for sensitive info, and a scrolling screenshot feature — all in a lightweight native app. It replaces your default screenshot workflow without adding any bloat.

Going Further: One Pick Per Category

Once you have the starter pack, here are the best native picks as your needs grow.

For system monitoring — Stats sits in your menu bar and shows CPU, memory, GPU, and network at a glance. Free, open source, lightweight.

For calendar — Itsycal adds a small calendar popup to your menu bar that shows upcoming events from Apple Calendar. Free, tiny, stays out of the way.

For PDF files — PDFgear is a fully featured PDF editor that's free. Annotate, fill forms, merge files, and more — no subscription needed.

For writing — iA Writer is the focused writing app. Clean interface, no distractions, excellent typography. If you write anything longer than a grocery list, it's worth the one-time purchase.

For image editing — Pixelmator Pro is a full Photoshop-level editor built natively for macOS. Supports Apple Silicon fully, uses machine learning for background removal and upscaling. One-time purchase.

For disk space — DaisyDisk gives you a visual map of what's taking up space on your drive. Beautiful, fast, native. When your SSD fills up, this is how you find out where it went.

For battery health — coconutBattery tells you your MacBook battery's actual health — current capacity vs. original design capacity, charge cycles, and more. Free. Run it once a month and you'll know if your battery is aging faster than expected.

The Apps to Be Careful With

You'll encounter these apps constantly. They're popular for good reasons — but knowing what they are helps you make smarter choices.

Notion — Wonderful for certain workflows, but it's an Electron app. On a new Mac, it loads slowly and uses more RAM than you'd expect. If you're using it for personal notes, try Bear or Craft first. If you need its database features for a team, that's the legitimate reason to keep it.

Slack — Electron, 500–800MB of RAM, ships a full copy of Chrome. If your team uses it, you need it — just quit it completely when you're not using it instead of leaving it running in the background.

Discord — Same story. Electron, heavy background footprint. If you use it for communities, configure it to quit on close rather than minimize to the menu bar.

Spotify — Uses a Chromium variant, not as heavy as full Electron but not native either. If you're open to alternatives, Apple Music's native Mac client is faster and uses less memory.

None of these apps are bad software. They're popular because they're useful. But understanding the tradeoff helps you manage them: keep them closed when you're not using them, don't let them auto-launch at login, and you'll get most of the benefit without the constant background drain.

The One Habit That Matters Most

Open System Settings → General → Login Items and look at what's set to launch automatically when you turn on your Mac.

Every app you install wants to be in that list. Notion wants to launch at startup. Slack wants to launch at startup. Spotify. Discord. They all do.

Most of them don't need to. Start with nothing in that list except the tools you genuinely want available the moment you log in (Rectangle, Maccy, Raycast — yes. Everything else — probably not).

You'll notice how much faster your Mac starts up and how much quieter your fans stay.

Where to Go From Here

The apps above are the foundation. As you build out your setup, the most useful resource I've found is an open GitHub list curated specifically around native macOS apps:

awesome-native-macosx-apps

It covers every category — developer tools, window managers, email clients, security tools, terminal emulators, video players — with a consistent focus on apps that are actually native. New apps get added regularly, and the community flags anything that sneaks in bloat.

It's not exhaustive. It's curated. That's the difference that matters when you're just getting started and don't want to wade through 200 mediocre options to find the five worth installing.

Your Mac is fast. Keep it that way.

What was the first native Mac app you found that genuinely surprised you? Drop it in the comments — I'm always looking for undiscovered ones.

20 Native macOS Apps That Replaced My Electron Bloat for Good

Mohsen Karimi — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:21:23 +0000

I opened Activity Monitor last year on a Thursday afternoon, just to check something quick. Slack was sitting at 780MB. Discord was at 410MB. Notion was at 490MB. Spotify was lurking at 280MB. I had four apps open — and they'd already consumed nearly 2GB of RAM before I'd written a single line of code.

My MacBook Pro fan was humming like it was rendering a film. The battery had dropped 18% in under an hour of light use. I hadn't even opened Xcode yet.

That was the moment I started paying attention to what these apps were actually built with — and more importantly, what I could replace them with.

What's Electron, and Why Should You Care?

Electron is a framework that lets developers build desktop apps using web technologies — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It bundles a full copy of Chromium and Node.js inside every app. That's the same engine powering Google Chrome, packaged and shipped as part of your "desktop" app.

The appeal is obvious: write once, ship everywhere. One codebase for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Faster time to market. Larger hiring pool. No need to learn Swift or AppKit.

But the user pays for that convenience every single day.

When you open Slack, you're not launching a Mac app. You're launching a browser. When you open Discord, you're launching another browser. Notion? Another browser. Each one is a separate Chromium instance, each one managing its own memory heap, its own JavaScript runtime, its own rendering pipeline.

Open five of these and you've got five browsers running simultaneously — whether you're using them or not.

The 1Password Moment

If you want a single story that captures how Mac users feel about Electron, look no further than 1Password 8.

1Password 7 was native macOS. It was fast, lightweight, integrated beautifully with the system. It respected your Mac. When version 8 launched in 2021, the team had rewritten it in Rust for the backend — which sounds good — but the UI was now built with Electron.

The response was volcanic.

The App Store reviews tanked. Reddit threads ran for hundreds of comments. Long-time users who'd paid for the app for years called it a betrayal. "It feels like a web app," was the most common complaint. "It's slow to open. It's slow to fill passwords. It doesn't feel like my Mac anymore."

Some users refused to upgrade and stayed on version 7 indefinitely. Others switched to Strongbox or migrated to Bitwarden entirely.

1Password didn't do anything malicious. Their engineering reasons were sound. But the community reaction revealed something important: Mac users notice. They feel the difference between something built for their platform and something that merely runs on it.

The Real Cost — By the Numbers

Let me be concrete about what Electron costs you.

Memory

A typical Electron app carries at minimum ~100MB of overhead just for Chromium, before your app does anything. In practice:

Slack routinely sits between 400–800MB, depending on how many workspaces you have open
Discord runs 300–500MB with GPU processes that stay active even when the window is hidden
Notion starts around 250MB and climbs as you open more pages
VS Code runs 200–400MB — better than most, but still heavy for a text editor
Spotify uses CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework — Electron's cousin) and hovers around 200–350MB

Compare that to native apps. Reeder — a full-featured RSS reader — uses around 40MB. Tot — a scratchpad utility — runs at under 20MB. Mimestream — a Gmail client rebuilt natively for Mac — sits around 80MB.

Battery

This is the one people feel most viscerally but track least often. Electron apps use more CPU because JavaScript is constantly being executed — event loops, garbage collection, re-renders. Native apps written in Swift compile down to machine code and can use Apple's energy-efficient frameworks properly.

On Apple Silicon Macs, the gap is even more visible. Apps that are properly optimized for M-series chips via native frameworks can use the efficiency cores intelligently. Electron can't do that. It runs on Chrome's rendering engine, which wasn't designed with Apple's power management in mind.

Disk Space

Every Electron app ships with its own copy of Chromium. That's roughly 100–200MB of duplicated engine, per app. If you have Slack, Discord, Notion, VS Code, and Figma installed, you have five copies of essentially the same browser sitting on your drive.

Slack's installer is over 200MB. Discord is around 100MB. Meanwhile, IINA — a full-featured video player that handles every format — is under 50MB.

App by App: What I Replaced and What I Used Instead

Here's where I'll stop being theoretical and get practical.

Slack → Mimestream (for email) + the actual Slack app, used ruthlessly

There's no great native Slack client. That's the honest answer. The best thing you can do is limit Slack to one workspace, disable it from auto-launching at startup, and quit it when you're in focus mode. But if your team uses email heavily, Mimestream is what a native Gmail client looks like when it's done right — built in Swift, fast, integrates with macOS like it belongs there.

VS Code → Zed

This one is the most impactful switch I've made.

Zed is a code editor built from scratch in Rust, with a GPU-rendered UI. It opens instantly. It handles large files without choking. It feels like what VS Code would be if it had been built natively for modern hardware. The extensions ecosystem is still catching up, but for most day-to-day work, Zed is faster in every measurable way.

Startup time: VS Code takes 3–6 seconds cold. Zed opens in under a second. That gap is entirely the cost of loading Electron and the Node.js runtime before your editor even starts.

If you're on a project that truly requires a specific VS Code extension that doesn't exist in Zed, keep VS Code for that context. But try Zed for a week and you'll notice the difference in your wrists and your attention span.

Notion → Craft

Craft is the native Notion. Built in Swift, it loads in a blink, supports offline mode properly, integrates with Spotlight, Quick Look, and the Share Sheet. It feels like a macOS app instead of a web app that forgot to remove the browser chrome.

If you're a heavy Notion user with complex databases and integrations, switching fully isn't realistic. But for personal notes, documents, and writing — Craft is in a different class.

Spotify → it's complicated

There's no perfect native Spotify client for Mac. Vinyls is a menu bar app that controls Spotify playback natively and stays out of your way. It's not a full replacement, but it means you don't need Spotify's Electron app open and visible — just Vinyls sitting in your menu bar.

If you're willing to step off Spotify entirely, the Music app on macOS is genuinely good for local libraries, and Apple Music's native client is... well, native.

Discord → Native clients exist, with caveats

Discordo is a terminal-based Discord client. Ripcord was a promising native client but has been in slow development. The honest reality here is that Discord's API is locked down enough that third-party clients are difficult to build and maintain.

The pragmatic fix: keep Discord but configure it to quit completely when closed (not just minimize to the menu bar), and only open it when you actually need it. The damage Discord does is mostly from running continuously in the background.

1Password 8 → Strongbox or stay on 1Password 7

If you're still on 1Password 7 and it's working, stay there. The app is still functional and perfectly secure.

If you need to move, Strongbox is a native password manager that uses the KeePass format, supports Face ID/Touch ID, and is genuinely pleasant to use. It feels like it was made for your Mac — because it was.

Apps That Prove Native Still Wins

Beyond replacements for Electron apps, there are apps that never touched Electron in the first place and are better for it. These are the apps I point people to when they ask what good Mac software looks like.

Rectangle — Window management via keyboard shortcuts. Free, open source, 40MB, works every time.

IINA — Video player. Handles MKV, AVI, HEVC, everything. Beautiful native UI. Under 50MB.

Maccy — Clipboard manager. Menu bar. Open source. Uses almost no memory. Does exactly one thing and does it perfectly.

Proxyman — If you do web development, Proxyman is a native HTTP debugging proxy that makes Charles Proxy look ancient. It's fast, it's beautiful, and it's genuinely useful.

Reeder — RSS reader that respects your eyes and your RAM. One of the best-designed Mac apps available.

Tot — A scratchpad that lives in your menu bar. Seven slots, each a different color. It's tiny, instant, and I use it every day.

When Electron Is Actually Fine

I want to be fair here, because the "Electron bad" take can become its own kind of dogma.

VS Code is Electron and it's transformed how millions of people write code. The extension ecosystem is unmatched. For many developers, no native alternative comes close in breadth of features.

Figma is Electron (and now web-first), and it changed the design industry. Nothing native competes with it at scale.

Linear — the project management tool — is Electron, and it's one of the best-designed apps I've ever used, native or otherwise. The team has clearly worked hard to make it feel fast despite the underlying framework.

The problem isn't Electron itself. The problem is teams that use Electron as a shortcut to avoid caring about performance. The best Electron apps are built by teams that fight against the framework's defaults. The worst ones just ship whatever Chrome renders and call it done.

Why This Matters More Now

On Apple Silicon Macs, native apps have never been better or more differentiated. The frameworks — SwiftUI, AppKit, Metal — are mature and powerful. Apps that are built natively can use the efficiency cores, integrate with Continuity features, respond to system-level events, and generally behave like they belong on the platform.

Electron apps run through Rosetta or via x86 compatibility layers, or they get compiled to Apple Silicon but still carry all the overhead of Chromium's rendering engine. The gap in battery life and responsiveness between a well-built native app and its Electron equivalent is larger on Apple Silicon than it was on Intel. The bar has moved, and Electron apps haven't kept up.

The Full List

If you want to explore more native macOS apps — across every category, with new additions regularly — I maintain an open list on GitHub:

awesome-native-macosx-apps

It covers everything from developer tools to video players to window managers, with a focus on apps that feel like they belong on macOS.

670+ developers have starred it. Pull requests welcome.

What's an Electron app you've successfully replaced? I'd genuinely like to know — drop it in the comments.