The State of Desktop App Development in 2025: A Guide to Modern Toolchains
While web and mobile development often steal the spotlight, the world of desktop application development remains vibrant and is undergoing significant evolution. The central debate revolves around a fundamental choice: leveraging the ubiquity of web technologies for cross-platform convenience versus using more traditional, native-focused toolkits for optimal performance and system integration.
The Rise of the Web as a Desktop Platform
A significant number of developers are building desktop applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This approach, popularized by frameworks like Electron and more recently by performance-oriented alternatives like Tauri (which uses a Rust backend) and Wails (using a Go backend), offers several advantages:
- Rapid Development: Teams can leverage existing web development skills and a vast ecosystem of libraries.
- Cross-Platform by Default: The same codebase can run on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
- AI-Friendly: LLMs are particularly adept at generating code for web-based UIs.
A key catalyst for this trend is the File System Access API in Chromium-based browsers. This API allows web applications to directly and persistently read and write to local files and directories with user permission, erasing a major historical limitation and enabling web-based tools to function like native editors and IDEs. However, this approach isn't without criticism; developers often cite performance overhead, high memory usage (particularly with Electron), and a user experience that can feel disconnected from the native operating system.
The Cross-Platform Native Champions
For those seeking native performance without writing separate apps for each OS, several powerful frameworks dominate the conversation.
Qt (C++) Qt is a mature, comprehensive C++ toolkit widely regarded as the gold standard for creating high-performance, cross-platform applications with a native look and feel. It is a top choice in industries requiring robust GUIs, from embedded systems to scientific computing. However, its licensing is a frequent point of contention. While it's available under the open-source LGPL license—which many developers use successfully for commercial products—The Qt Company's commercial licensing terms and sales tactics are a source of frustration and caution for many.
.NET and Avalonia (C#) In the .NET ecosystem, Windows Forms and WPF are still alive and well for Windows-only development, valued for their stability and simplicity. For new, cross-platform projects, Avalonia UI has emerged as a clear favorite. It provides a modern, XAML-based framework that will feel familiar to WPF developers but targets Windows, macOS, Linux, and even WebAssembly, often with Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation for better performance.
The New Wave: Rust and Flutter
Rust is rapidly becoming a go-to language for systems programming, and its UI ecosystem is growing. Frameworks like Slint, egui, and Iced are enabling developers to build fast, memory-safe, and efficient desktop applications. While the ecosystem is less mature than that of C++ or C#, its focus on performance and safety makes it a compelling choice for new projects.
Flutter, Google's UI toolkit, is praised for its high developer productivity, expressive UI, and the ability to build for desktop, mobile, and web from a single codebase using the Dart language. Despite its technical merits, it faces a significant trust issue. Many developers are hesitant to commit to the framework for long-term projects, fearing it will eventually be abandoned by Google—a phenomenon often called the "Google Graveyard."
Enduring Legacy and Niche Tools
Beyond the major players, several other toolchains continue to serve their communities well:
- Lazarus and FreePascal: For developers with a background in Delphi, Lazarus provides a powerful, open-source, and cross-platform equivalent.
- Swift/Objective-C and AppKit: The default choice for developers building applications exclusively for macOS.
- Dear ImGui: An immediate-mode GUI library that is immensely popular for creating tools and debug interfaces within game development.
- JUCE: The de-facto standard for building cross-platform audio applications and plugins.