We have no plans to rewrite Fluxer's web and desktop apps in Rust, though most of our backend services and parts of our apps use Rust. For a native desktop app, we're building Fluxer Lite (working name) from our Flutter app, and the Electron app stays fully supported. Whether we ever port the web app depends on how Discord's port goes.
Discord's co-founder and CTO, Stanislav Vishnevskiy, said on November 4, 2026 that Discord is moving its whole app to Rust and that Electron goes away on desktop.1 You can read what Discord announced and why we expect its new app to be fast, and what it costs the people who use Discord, from client mods to control over their own app.
Why won't Fluxer rewrite its web and desktop apps in Rust?
Rewriting our web and desktop apps in Rust would mean building every feature again from scratch while we keep the current apps running, and some features, like custom CSS themes, only work because the apps run on the web platform.
For a small team like ours, that would stop most work on new features for a long time. We work on our roadmap and on making the app faster on every platform. Discord is a much larger company with many more engineers working on its apps.
Fluxer started as a web app because Hampus had the most experience with the web when he started building it. The desktop app runs the same code as the web app at fluxer.com, and both of them get new features and fixes at the same time.
The web and desktop apps stay on the web platform, where you can mod them and use your own CSS, and anyone can read what each version does in our open source code.
Does Fluxer already use Rust?
Most of Fluxer's backend services are written in Rust, such as the media proxy for uploads and thumbnails and the services for users, messages and push notifications. The API and its background worker use TypeScript, and the gateway that keeps each app connected uses Erlang/OTP, as Hampus explains in how he built Fluxer's backend.
Our new voice and video system, item 2 on our roadmap for 2026, is built in Rust too, both on our servers and inside the apps. It's meant to fix the voice, video and screen share problems people have reported, and the desktop app will use it to encode and decode video on your graphics card on Windows, macOS and Linux where it can.
Our web and desktop apps already use Rust where it helps. The web app runs Rust code compiled to WebAssembly to unpack the compressed data it gets from our servers, to read, crop and rotate images, and to decode and encode animated WebP images.
The desktop app has more than 20 native modules written in Rust, for screen and game capture, capturing the sound of a single app, hardware video encoding, passkeys and global shortcuts such as push-to-talk on Windows, macOS and Linux, and for spell checking on Linux. We keep moving parts like these to Rust when it makes the app faster or more reliable, which is a much smaller job than rewriting the whole app from scratch.
Could Fluxer port its web app to Rust one day?
Maybe, and we want to see how Discord's attempt turns out first. Discord hasn't said how it's moving its app to Rust, only that the new app "looks and works identically to the current one", and it hasn't given a date for when people can start trying it.2
One way to move a web app to Rust is a codemod, a program that rewrites code automatically, plus cleanup by hand. For an app as big as Discord's, making every part look and work exactly like the web version that way would be an enormous job.
Fluxer's app is much smaller, so a codemod like that could be possible for us as an experiment. The goal would be a GPUI app that stays in step with our web app on its own, with no extra upkeep at all for our small team. The DOM that browsers use to draw our web app works very differently from GPUI, though, so we find it hard to see how such an app could ever need no upkeep, even with a perfect codemod.
If you want to try it, please do, and share your results with us. Please don't vibe-code it, though, because we want to see code that a person understands. Unlike Discord's apps, Fluxer's code is open source, and you're allowed to build your own client like this.
Our own plan stays the same. We keep improving our native Flutter app for iPhone, iPad and Android phones and tablets, and we're working on making its desktop version, Fluxer Lite, feel truly native and work well on Windows, macOS and Linux too.
Couldn't Fluxer raise money and hire a team to build it in Rust?
We don't take venture capital or money from any outside investors, and the people who use Fluxer fund it through optional purchases and donations. You can read what has happened at other apps after they were sold or listed on a stock market.
Even with a bigger team, a second app in another language would mean building and fixing every feature twice. A native, compiled app is already on the way, because our iOS and Android apps are built with Flutter and Fluxer Lite brings that same app to desktop.
What will Fluxer do for people who want a native app?
Our iOS and Android apps are native apps built with Flutter, and we've started work on a desktop version with the working name Fluxer Lite. It will be a separate download for people who want a desktop app without Electron, and it has no release date.
Our Electron desktop app stays fully supported and keeps getting updates, and we keep working on its performance. We list recent examples in what we do to keep the app fast. If the app runs slowly on your computer, please report it as a bug.
Sources
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Post by Stanislav Vishnevskiy, X, published 2026-11-04, accessed 2026-11-05.
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Reply by Stanislav Vishnevskiy, X, published 2026-11-04, accessed 2026-11-05.