Tauri
A native desktop app that uses the operating system's webview instead of shipping a browser.
Why Tauri
Tauri builds a native app around a web frontend, using the system webview — WebView2, WKWebView, or WebKitGTK — instead of bundling Chromium like Electron. Apps are much smaller and use less memory. Tauri 2 can also target iOS and Android from the same project.
The trade-off is Rust. The native side is a small Rust project in desktop/src-tauri, and building it needs a Rust toolchain.
What that means for auth
A Tauri webview and the system browser don't share cookies. So the desktop app:
- opens the system browser for Google sign-in,
- gets its session back through a
bones://callbackdeep link, - and sends it as a bearer token, not a cookie.
The token is held in memory for now, so it's lost on restart. An OS-keychain store is waiting on a mature official plugin.