Discord is now available as an M1 native app albeit in an early preview form through the app’s canary version. This means that the new Discord app update will provide improved performance and efficiency on Apple Silicon Macs, which include the M1 MacBook Air, Mac mini, MacBook Pro, iMac, and M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pro.
Discord’s M1 native app is much faster and responsive than its Intel version
Discord is one of the most popular instant messaging and voice communication apps available on any platform and is often used by gamers and other communities. The app is built using Electron, a cross-platform framework that also runs on Windows and Linux. This framework helps with cross-compatibility and feature parity however, it can also make the app bloated and make the app laggy, compared to actual native Mac apps built using Objective-C or Swift.
Even though Electron was updated with native M1 support last year but app developers still need time to update their apps and make sure that their app features and any dependencies work with the new architecture.
Despite being built on Electron, the new Canary build of Discord is noticeably faster than the Intel version of the app that runs using Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon Macs. The app is more responsive, loads messages and channels faster than ever, and just feels snappier than before.
Before you rush over to download the Canary version of Discord to take advantage of the Apple Silicon native performance, it is important to note that this is an early alpha build of the app. After Canary, Discord will be released to the beta channel, also known as public test build (PTB) for Desktop, which is a lot more stable than the alpha build and can be used as a daily driver. The last stage will be the stable build that will be the one that rolls out to all Discord users and is the most stable release.
If you are an enthusiast, and willing to take the risk, you can download the Discord Canary version here. If you run into any issues, you can uninstall it, and re-download the stable version to fix the issues.
