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Back in August, users of password management app 1Password saw a familiar prompt inside their desktop apps: a new update was available. But the launch of 1Password 8.0 wasn’t a routine update. Under the hood, something significant changed: the underlying architecture of the app was switched to Electron.
Electron, or “ElectronJS” to use its full title, is on paper a rather clever idea. It allows developers to write an app only once, so instead of writing an app for Windows, an app for macOS and an app for Linux, the same code powers the app on multiple platforms.
It’s both popular and open source, and the framework is used today for a range of popular desktop apps, from Slack and WhatsApp to Twitch. Even Microsoft has embraced it to build the hugely popular Visual Studio Code