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Find the Electron apps on your Mac and how much space they take

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Some Mac apps are built with Electron, which means each one carries its own copy of a browser engine. One line in Terminal lists them with their size and Electron version. Here is what that list means and what, if anything, to do about it.

Disclosure: I make Legroom, a disk space app, and BatteryMeter, a free battery readout. Neither one lists Electron apps; this guide uses only what is built into macOS. I ran the command below on my own Mac on October 23, 2026. Electron facts come from the Electron project's own pages, read the same day.

What an Electron app is

Electron is a way to build a desktop app with web technology. Its documentation says it packages Chromium, the engine inside Google Chrome, and Node.js into each app. So every Electron app carries its own copy of a browser engine. Slack, Discord, Visual Studio Code and Obsidian are well-known examples.

That is a design choice, not a warning sign. Electron apps are ordinary, signed software from their makers. The costs are size, since each app brings its own engine, and keeping that engine up to date, which only the app's maker can do.

List the Electron apps on your Mac

Open Terminal (in Applications, then Utilities), paste this line and press Return. It only reads: nothing is installed, changed or sent anywhere.

find /Applications ~/Applications -maxdepth 5 -type d -name "Electron Framework.framework" 2>/dev/null | while read -r fw; do app="${fw%%/Contents/Frameworks/*}"; printf '%s\t%s\t%s\n' "$(du -sh "$app" | cut -f1)" "$(/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c 'Print :CFBundleVersion' "$fw/Resources/Info.plist")" "$app"; done | sort -rh

It prints one line per Electron app, largest first: the app's size on disk, the Electron version inside it, and where it is. On my Mac it printed one app, Claude, at 615 MB with Electron 44.9.3. The Electron Framework alone was 286 MB of that.

What it does not see: apps elsewhere than Applications, apps added to Applications as a shortcut (an alias or symbolic link), and apps built on the similar Chromium Embedded Framework, such as Adobe Acrobat. Sizes are in units of 1,024, so they read a little smaller than Finder's Get Info.

What the Electron version tells you

The Electron team supports the latest three major versions. Electron 45 came out on October 20, 2026, which makes 43, 44 and 45 the supported ones on the date of this guide (release schedule, support policy). Electron's security guidance tells app makers to use the latest version, because updates bring fixes for the bundled Chromium and Node.js. An app on an older version is not necessarily unsafe, but it is missing those fixes until its maker updates it.

The macOS 26 slowdown. After macOS 26 Tahoe shipped, some Electron apps made the whole Mac lag. Electron fixed it in September 2025 (pull request 48376), in versions 36.9.2, 37.6.0 and 38.2.0 and every version from 39 on. If an app shows a lower version than those, update it. The community tracker ShameElectron listed 56 fixed and 27 unfixed apps when I read it.

What to do about it

I found no careful public measurement of how much more memory or battery Electron apps use than native ones, so this guide gives no number. To see your own: Activity Monitor's Memory and Energy tabs show it per app, and BatteryMeter lists the apps using the most power. For disk space as a whole, Legroom ($9.99 once after a 7-day trial; its menu-bar readout and low-space alerts stay free) shows where the space went.

Frequently asked

How do I know if a Mac app uses Electron?

Look inside the app for a folder named Electron Framework.framework in Contents, Frameworks. The Terminal command in this guide does that for every app in Applications and prints the Electron version from that framework.

Should I delete Electron apps?

No, not because they are Electron. Electron describes how an app is built, not whether it is safe or good. Remove apps you never use the normal way, and keep the rest updated.

Why do Electron apps make my Mac lag on macOS 26?

Older Electron versions overrode a private macOS drawing method, which made the window server work hard on macOS 26. Electron fixed it in 36.9.2, 37.6.0, 38.2.0 and 39 onward. Update the app; if it is still old, the fix is up to its maker.

How much space does Electron take?

On my Mac the Electron Framework inside one app was 286 MB, and the whole app was 615 MB, measured October 23, 2026. Each Electron app carries its own copy, so several of them add up. I found no official typical figure.

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