Brow (Why We Built Brow in Swift, Not Electron)

A lot of Mac utilities talk about speed. What matters more is why they feel fast, where the limits come from, and what trade-offs the architecture creates later. That was one of the earliest decisions behind Brow: build it as a native Swift app from day one. Not because “native” sounds good in marketing. Because for the kind of product we wanted to build — launcher, notch layer, system utilities, hardware-aware modules — architecture changes what is possible. The real question was never just “Swift vs Electron” The real question was: Do we want a Mac app that happens to run on macOS, or a Mac app that is built for macOS from the inside? Electron is a valid choice for many teams. It optimizes for one codebase, faster iteration, and easier cross-platform shipping. Raycast took a different route. Its app is native, but its extension ecosystem is built around React, TypeScript, and Node so developers can build on top of it quickly. That is a smart trade-off. But it is still a trade-off. We