Building a Cross-Platform File Search App With Tauri — Not Electron

Every knowledge worker I know has the same problem: files scattered across Google Drive, Dropbox, SharePoint, Slack, Notion, GitHub, and their local machine. When you need to find something, you end up opening 4 different search bars. I built OmniFile to fix that — a single search bar that finds files across all your sources instantly. Desktop app, privacy-first, everything stays on your machine. Here's what I learned building it with Tauri + Rust instead of Electron, and why integrating 7 OAuth providers in a desktop app was harder than I expected. Why Tauri Over Electron The decision was simple: OmniFile needs to launch instantly (it's triggered by a global shortcut) and stay lightweight in the background. Electron ships a full Chromium browser. Tauri uses the OS's native webview and a Rust backend. The result: ~8MB installer vs Electron's ~80MB+ ~30MB RAM at idle vs Electron's ~150MB+ Rust backend for CPU-intensive indexing and file I/O The tradeoff is that you write your backend in