Swiftcord For Mac

Discord has become the default chatting platform for many communities, and it certainly has the features to earn that title. What it doesn’t have, however, is a native Mac client, with the official app being Electron-based.

Swiftcord is meant to be an alternative to the official client. It’s built entirely in Swift, so you can expect much better performance, along with greatly reduced disk space usage. However, very few of Discord’s features have been implemented and are working properly, so this is more of a project to keep an eye on.

Before we get to the negatives, we have to praise the app’s speed and small size. As you would expect from a Swift-based application, it loads quickly, has low CPU and RAM usage, and everything in the interface just feels snappier.

While this is partly due to the fact that tons of features have yet to be implemented, the UI is also much more minimalistic, making it a great choice for users who are just interested in chatting and aren’t too fond of Discord’s other tools.

It’s worth noting that Swiftcord is still in the Alpha stage, so there’s still a long way to go. For the time being, all you can really do is join servers and use text chat. Voice chat isn’t supported, along with almost every other feature.

Even the Settings window is noticeably barren, save for a few options that allow you to hide or show NSFW channels, change the UI theme, and customize some accessibility settings. Every other function is unimplemented.

As much as we’d like to ditch the official app in favor of a native client, Swiftcord isn’t quite there yet. If you’re only interested in text chat and are fine with giving up every other feature (including emojis and GIFs), it will do the job. Otherwise, you should just keep an eye out for future releases.