Discord Rebuilds Its App in Rust, Cutting RAM Use to 290 MB

He said Discord adopted Rust early, in 2018, and that much of its infrastructure, its voice technology and even part of the current client already run on it. Moving the full client to the language was the "Holy Grail", he wrote, and it means the end of Electron and of React Native. Mobile apps will keep a native user interface but share application code with the desktop version through Rust.

290 MB versus up to 4 GB

A Task Manager screenshot shared by Vishnevskiy shows a development build, codenamed Discord Phoenix, using just 290 MB of RAM with two accounts signed in. It is a single capture, with no detail on what the app was doing. Discord acknowledges that its current app, which normally stays under 1 GB, can climb to 4 GB on Windows.

The company has not said whether the option to disable hardware acceleration will remain, even though it is useful on modest configurations and GPUI relies on the GPU for the whole interface.

Users should see no visual change: Vishnevskiy says the new app will look and work like the current one. It will keep the system's web engine only to display certain content, such as YouTube videos or Activities.

No release date yet

No date has been announced. The co-founder hopes to open user tests "soon", and Discord has made no official announcement.

The move runs against the trend. Netflix dropped its native Windows app for a web app in 2024, and Meta did the same with WhatsApp in 2025. Microsoft, meanwhile, is pushing developers toward WinUI, which it made the reference platform for Windows apps at Build 2026 and is using to rewrite parts of the Windows 11 interface, starting with the Start menu.