The Default Choice Nobody Questions
When most developers think "I'll build a desktop app with web tech," Electron is the automatic answer. It's battle-tested, well-documented, and used by VS Code, Slack, and dozens of other apps you use every day.
So why didn't I use it?
The Problem with Electron for a Logcat Viewer
A Logcat viewer has one brutal requirement: it needs to handle thousands of log lines per second without breaking a sweat.
Electron ships with a full Chromium instance and Node.js runtime. For a notes app or a code editor, that overhead is fine. For a tool that's piping high-frequency ADB output in real time, it's a problem. Memory climbs fast, and the UI starts to feel sluggish exactly when you need it to be sharp.
I wanted something lightweight that wouldn't compete with the Android emulator for resources.
Enter Tauri v2
Tauri takes a different approach. Instead of bundling its own browser engine, it uses the OS's native WebView — on macOS, that's WebKit. The result is a dramatically smaller binary and a much lower memory footprint.
The backend runs in Rust, which handles the heavy lifting: piping ADB output, filtering, masking sensitive data. The React frontend stays smooth because it's only doing what frontends should do — rendering.
The Tradeoffs
Tauri isn't perfect. The ecosystem is smaller than Electron's, and some things that are one-liners in Electron require more work in Tauri. Cross-platform support also requires more attention, though for a macOS-only tool that wasn't a concern for me.
The Tauri v2 plugin system is still maturing, and occasionally you hit rough edges. But for a performance-sensitive macOS utility, the tradeoffs were absolutely worth it.
The Result
HiyokoLogcat's memory footprint is tiny compared to equivalent Electron apps. It launches fast, stays responsive under heavy log output, and doesn't feel like it's fighting the rest of your dev environment.
If you're building a macOS utility that needs to handle real-time data, Tauri v2 is worth a serious look.
👉 GitHub: https://github.com/Hiyoyoko/HiyokoLogcat
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