Electron Stayed Over One Hundred Twenty-One Thousand Stars Because, for All the Jokes, Building Cross-Platform Desktop Apps With Web Tech Is Still an Insanely Useful Superpower

The sarcastic version is still honest: people love mocking Electron until they need a cross-platform desktop app in the real world and suddenly the “ship with web skills” argument becomes extremely persuasive again.

GitHub shows Electron at roughly 121,442 stars. That is not an accident. Electron became massive because it made desktop software accessible to the largest pool of developers on the planet: web developers.

What Electron is for

Electron is for:

1. cross-platform desktop apps
2. internal tooling
3. developer tools
4. rich UI products with desktop packaging
5. teams that want one desktop codebase across macOS, Windows, and Linux

Its greatest strength is leverage.

Start a minimal Electron app

npm init -y
npm install electron --save-dev

Create main.js:

const { app, BrowserWindow } = require("electron");

function createWindow() {
  const win = new BrowserWindow({ width: 900, height: 700 });
  win.loadURL("data:text/html,<h1>Electron is running</h1>");
}

app.whenReady().then(createWindow);

Run it:

npx electron .

Why it stayed huge

Electron solved a hard market problem:

1. cross-platform desktop UI
2. huge developer familiarity
3. fast prototyping
4. rich app capabilities
5. packaging pipeline maturity

That is why it survived the jokes.

How to package and deploy

Common tooling includes builders like electron-builder.

Typical next step:

npm install --save-dev electron-builder

Then configure packaging and run the build command defined in your project.

What it disrupted

Electron made desktop software a web-accessible category. Whatever its tradeoffs, that changed the market permanently. It turned “desktop app company” from a specialist identity into something many web teams could plausibly become.

Sources

• GitHub: electron/electron
• Electron documentation