I’ve been using the DeepL Desktop App on my Mac for quite a while now, and while I absolutely love the ⌘CC shortcut to quickly translate text anywhere, I keep running into some issues with the app itself.
The first thing I’ve noticed is performance. Even when it’s just sitting idle in the background, it usually eats up around 5% CPU and about 70 MB of RAM. For something that’s “just” a translation and text improvement tool, that feels like a lot. I’m guessing it might be built on Electron (correct me if I’m wrong), which would explain part of the resource usage.
On top of that, there’s a pretty annoying bug. Sometimes when I click into the DeepL window and start typing, it suddenly stops registering my keystrokes after half a second. Then it kind of freezes, and when it comes back, the cursor jumps to the beginning of the text field and continues writing there. It doesn’t happen every single time, but often enough to break the flow. I’m assuming it’s connected to whatever’s going on in the background because it feels sluggish overall.
And to add one more point, which was also mentioned recently [1]: the app seems to want to update almost every single day. Is that really necessary? What kind of updates are being rolled out so frequently? Wouldn’t a weekly or even monthly release cycle be enough?
What I’d really love is a super lightweight and fast desktop app that just focuses on the essentials: translation and text improvement, nothing fancy. Right now, with the performance issues, the typing lag, and the constant updates, the desktop app is starting to lose its value for me. And it seems to get worse, not better.
I’m curious if anyone else has run into the same problems. Do you see similar performance issues, the weird typing lag, or get annoyed by the daily updates? Would be great to hear your experiences.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/maxschulze_endrant-activity-7367255380231475203-zbIn