🆕 Updated: the app is now at v0.0.3, with SSO sign-in support, a proper offline screen, a sign-out that no longer strands you, and a few embarrassing bugs squashed. Jump to What's New if you read the original version. 👇
TL;DR 📌
- 🕰️ Then: I built google-chat-electron by hand, over months, reading tutorial after tutorial.
- ⚡ Now: I rebuilt the whole thing as google-chat-tauri in less than 24 hours — and I did not write the code. Claude did.
- 🦀 Plot twist: I don't know Rust. Not a little — at all. The AI wrote every line of it.
- 📦 Result: a 3 MB Linux installer, against 66 MB for the Electron build of the same app. Same features. Real numbers, measured off both repos' release assets.
- 🧪 Status: still pre-release, but three releases deep now. Fun project. Stable version coming after real-world testing.
Let's dive in. 👇
The Electron Era: Months of Honest, Manual Labour 😅
A few years ago I wanted Google Chat in a real window — with a tray icon, an unread badge and native notifications — instead of a browser tab that disappears among thirty other browser tabs.
So I built it. In Electron. By hand.
And it took months. Not because Electron is bad, but because every single thing was a tutorial:
- How do I make a tray icon that actually behaves?
- How do I keep the app alive when the window closes?
- How do I intercept a link and open it in the real browser?
- How do I package a
.deb? A.dmg? An installer for Windows? - Why does this work on my machine and nowhere else? 🙃
Every answer was a blog post, a GitHub issue thread, or a Stack Overflow reply from 2017 that almost applied. It shipped, people used it, and I was genuinely proud of it. It's no longer maintained — this is its replacement.
The Tauri Rewrite: One Evening, One Prompt Loop 🤖
Last week I opened Claude Code and asked it to port the app to Tauri v2.
I did not open the Rust book. I did not read the Tauri docs. I described what the app should do, reviewed what came back, ran it on my actual laptop, and reported what broke.
Timeline:
| Time | What happened |
|---|---|
15:42 |
git init |
17:01 |
Full Electron → Tauri v2 port committed |
17:25 |
Desktop notifications working |
| < 24h later |
v0.0.1 tagged and released 🎉 |
| +1 day |
v0.0.2, then v0.0.3 with SSO sign-in and a real offline screen |
44 commits. ~4,800 lines of Rust and JavaScript. Zero lines typed by me.
This is what people mean by vibe coding — and honestly, it felt less like programming and more like directing. My job became: describe the behaviour, test it on real hardware, and say "the tray icon doesn't come back on Wayland." The AI handled the rest.
⚠️ The honest caveat: AI wrote it, but a human ran it. Almost every real bug was a platform behaving differently from its own documentation — the kind of thing no model can find by reading docs. That part still needs a person with a laptop and some patience.
Tauri vs Electron: Why the Rewrite Was Worth It ⚖️
Here's the thing — Electron ships an entire Chromium browser with your app. Tauri doesn't. It uses the web engine your operating system already has: WebKitGTK on Linux, WKWebView on macOS, WebView2 on Windows.
| ⚛️ Electron | 🦀 Tauri v2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Browser engine | Ships its own Chromium | Uses the OS web engine |
| Linux installer size | 66 MB (my old app) | 3 MB (the same app) 🤯 |
| Backend language | Node.js | Rust |
| Memory footprint | Heavy — it's a browser | Noticeably lighter |
| Startup | Boot a Chromium | Boot a native window |
| Security model | Opt-in hardening | Capability-based by default |
Those two size numbers are the same app, same features, measured off the release assets of both repos. 22× smaller. 🤏
The size difference is the headline, but the one you feel every day is startup and memory. You're not launching a second Chrome just to read messages from your team. The window opens like a native window, because it basically is one.
The trade-off? You inherit the OS web engine's quirks — and they are real. WebKitGTK renders its failed-load page as literally <html><body>%s</body></html> with no styling whatsoever, which on a dark window means black text on a black background. Chromium would never. More on that below. 🧪
What the App Actually Does ✨
This isn't a "hello world in a webview." It's a real desktop client:
- 🔴 Unread indicator — a dot on the tray icon, the count in the window title, and a badge on the macOS dock or Windows taskbar.
- 🔔 Desktop notifications — with sound. On Linux, clicking one brings the window back.
- 🗂️ Lives in the tray — closing the window hides it; the app keeps running and keeps notifying.
- 🪟 Remembers your window — size, position and maximised state come back where you left them.
- 1️⃣ Single instance — launching again just focuses the window you already have.
- 📋 Native menu bar — File, Edit, View, History, Preferences, Help, with zoom that persists between launches.
- 🚀 Starts how you like — launch at login, and/or start hidden in the tray on any launch.
- ⌨️ Keyboard shortcuts —
Ctrl+Fto search,Ctrl+/-/0to zoom,Alt+←/Alt+→to navigate,Alt+Hometo get back to Chat,Ctrl+Wto hide to tray. - 🌐 Links open in your real browser — a Docs, Sheets or Calendar link opens where your extensions and logins already live. Only Chat stays in the window.
- 📎 Attachments download through your browser — it saves them the way it saves anything else.
- 🔐 Signs in normally — personal Google accounts and paid Workspace accounts, in any country.
- 🏢 SSO sign-in works too — Okta, Entra ID, Ping and friends. (New — see below.)
- 📡 Handles a missing network gracefully — a readable offline page with a Try again button, and it reconnects on its own.
- 🧯 A way back from a wedged session — Help → Reset App Data signs you out, resets every preference and restarts clean.
No analytics. No auto-updater installing things behind your back — it just asks GitHub once a day whether a newer release exists and tells you. You can turn that off. 🙌
Available for Linux (.deb + .AppImage), macOS (universal .dmg) and Windows (.exe).
What's New Since I Published This Post 🆕
The post went up at v0.0.1. Here's what shipped after — mostly things real usage found, which is exactly the pattern I described above: the AI writes it, reality corrects it.
🏢 SSO / identity-provider sign-in now works
Originally I documented this as flatly unsupported. If your company signs you in through Okta, Entra ID or Ping, the flow redirects to your organisation's host — which the app can't know ahead of time, so it isn't on the short list of hosts allowed to stay in the window. The link would open in your browser and finish the sign-in there, leaving the app still signed out. 🤦
The fix is pleasingly simple: Preferences → Temporarily Open Every Link in This Window. It explains what it's doing before it does anything, keeps every link inside the app for five minutes — long enough to get through any SSO flow — and then switches itself off again. No permanent footgun left enabled.
🚪 Sign Out that doesn't strand you
There were three separate ways the window could get stuck in a state where the only escape was Reset App Data — the nuclear option that wipes everything.
The nastiest: after signing out, Google sometimes answers a session-less visit with workspace.google.com — a marketing page — instead of the login form. And that page's own "Sign in" link did nothing, because the injected script intercepts cross-origin clicks on every page, the IPC permission only covered Google's Chat and Mail domains, and the resulting rejection was silently swallowed. Click → cancelled → dropped into the void. 🕳️
Now the window navigates itself when Rust can't be asked, and the app redirects off that marketing page to the real sign-in form (at most twice — a redirect loop is worse than a dead end). You should never have to wipe your data to sign back in.
📡 An offline screen you can actually read
Remember that WebKitGTK failed-load page? Black text, dark background, one unstyled line. The app now rewrites that document into something readable with a Try again button.
Which, delightfully, could not simply reload — WebKit refuses to navigate its error page to the URL it's standing in for, and the page's opaque origin makes every IPC call fail with Origin header is not a valid URL. So the button aims at Chat's canonical URL instead, and in the background the app keeps probing the network and loads Chat by itself within about half a minute of your connection coming back. Usually before you even reach for the button. ✨
🐛 The bug I find funniest
The update checker couldn't see pre-releases. Which is a genuinely hilarious flaw in an app whose only releases are pre-releases. v0.0.1 could never have told you v0.0.2 existed. Fixed in v0.0.2 — so v0.0.1 users had to find it manually, one last time. 😬
⌨️ Plus the small stuff
-
Alt+Hometo jump back to Chat was declared on the History menu and answered by absolutely nothing — GTK accelerators never reach the app while focus is inside the webview. It now routes through the injected script like every other shortcut. - Start hidden in the tray on any launch, not just at login.
- CI stopped spending thirty minutes compiling Rust to prove that a README typo didn't break the build. 🙃
Where Things Stand 🚧
Let me be very clear about this part:
- 🎈 This is a fun project. It scratches an itch. It is not a startup.
- 🦀 I don't know Rust. If you open an issue about a borrow checker decision, the AI made it, not me.
- 🧪 It's still pre-release.
v0.0.3. Linux is where it's been tested most; macOS and Windows builds exist and need real users on real machines. - ✅ A stable release is coming once it's been properly tested in the wild.
If you use Google Chat on the desktop and you're feeling brave, try it and tell me what breaks. Every fix in the section above exists because something broke in real life — that's genuinely the most useful thing you can contribute right now. 🐛
The Takeaway 💭
Months of manual work, then a full rewrite in a different language, on a different framework, in under a day — by someone who can't write that language.
That's not a flex about me. It's a data point about where tooling is in 2026. And the follow-up releases make the shape of it clearer: the hard part was never typing the code. It was knowing what the app should do and checking it against reality — the WebKit error page, the Google marketing redirect, the GTK accelerator that goes nowhere. AI took the first job, instantly. The second one is still ours. 🤝
🔗 Links
- 🦀 Tauri version (new): https://github.com/ankurk91/google-chat-tauri
- ⚛️ Electron version (original, unmaintained): https://github.com/ankurk91/google-chat-electron
- 📥 Download the latest pre-release: https://github.com/ankurk91/google-chat-tauri/releases
- 🐛 Report an issue: https://github.com/ankurk91/google-chat-tauri/issues
- 📚 Tauri v2 docs: https://v2.tauri.app
- 🤖 Claude Code: https://claude.com/claude-code
Unofficial app. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Google. "Google Chat" and the Chat logo are trademarks of Google LLC.
Have you migrated an Electron app to Tauri? Or vibe-coded something bigger than you expected? Drop it in the comments — I'd love to read about it. 👇
Top comments (1)
wow🧐,need to try it out