Notion Ditches Electron for SwiftUI, Signaling Mac App Shift
What You Need to Know
- Notion is migrating from Electron to SwiftUI, signaling Electron’s declining use on Mac.
- Electron apps bundle Chromium, creating noticeable performance overhead for all-day productivity applications.
- AI-assisted development tools make native rewrites more feasible by reducing timeline and cost risks.
- SwiftUI performance improvements include twice-as-fast nested stack layouts and lazy state initialization.
Notion’s migration to SwiftUI is the real story at WWDC this week, but the more telling detail is what it says about Electron’s quiet retreat from the Mac.
Apple used Notion as its flagship example during the Platforms State of the Union precisely because the app’s reputation for sluggishness is so well established. Electron-based apps run inside a bundled Chromium shell, which means every interaction carries the overhead of a browser engine. For a productivity app people keep open all day, that cost is noticeable in ways that are harder to dismiss than benchmark numbers.
The migration is not starting from zero. Notion had already been moving its iOS and Android apps toward native rendering through 2025, with most of the mobile experience rebuilt except for the editor. The WWDC callout suggests the Mac is now the active front, with SwiftUI as the target rather than a patchwork of platform-specific wrappers.
Apple’s framing around AI-assisted development is worth taking at face value here. The claim that “porting code to Swift has never been easier” is partly promotional, but teams that have avoided native rewrites because of cost and timeline risk now have a more credible argument for the investment. For an app like Notion, which runs on Mac, iOS, Android, and web, the coordination complexity of going native on Apple platforms is real, and anything that compresses that timeline changes the calculus.
What SwiftUI itself gains
The framework updates announced alongside the Notion news are more substantial than a typical annual refresh:
- Nested stack layouts resize up to twice as fast
- State objects now initialize lazily, reducing startup overhead
- AsyncImage gains automatic HTTP caching
- New reorderable containers support drag-to-reorder across any container type
- macOS Text gains custom renderers, vibrancy, and vertical text support
The unification of SwiftUI, AppKit, and UIKit around a shared foundation is the structural change underneath all of it. Improvements Apple builds for its own apps now propagate to third-party developers automatically, which is a different model than asking developers to adopt new APIs piecemeal. For apps considering a move away from cross-platform stacks, the platform is at least moving in a consistent direction.
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