A 2026 Audit of Famous Electron Apps — Why VS Code, Slack, and Claude Desktop Stick With It and What's Quietly Leaving

Electron in 2026 still powers Visual Studio Code, Slack, Discord, Notion, 1Password 8, Signal Desktop, ChatGPT for Windows, the newly arrived OpenAI Codex Desktop, and Claude Desktop, while Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp Desktop, and Zed have moved off it. Working from public engineering blogs and repository inspection, this post maps the famous Electron adopters, untangles common mis-identifications, and lays out the optimization patterns that define the 2026 picture.