Haven 2.0 — the rebuild
Back in the first dev log I said I was "actively testing" Tauri and Solid.js on an exploration branch, and that a lighter desktop shell was on the bench. Well. The bench experiment became the whole thing. Haven 2.0 is desktop and web, rebuilt from the studs.
What actually changed
The old desktop client was Electron. The web client was React on Vite. They both shipped, they both worked, and they both got me here — I'm genuinely fond of them. But they were also the parts of Haven I built first, while I was learning the entire stack as I went. After four React Native mobile rebuilds I'd learned a lot about keeping logic out of the UI, and I wanted to bring that back to the platforms that started it all.
So 2.0 is:
- Desktop on Tauri instead of Electron — a much lighter native shell.
- The UI on Solid instead of React — a faster renderer that fit the way I wanted to design.
- Web built from the exact same code as desktop, shipped as a static site.
- One framework-free core underneath all of it — the same core the iOS app runs on. Business logic, permissions, realtime: written once, reused everywhere.
That last point is the one I care about most. The whole reason the rebuild was worth the pain is that a feature can land once and show up on every platform, instead of me rebuilding it three times and introducing three different bugs.
The part that hurt
I'm not going to pretend this was clean. Rebuilding desktop and web while keeping feature parity with what was already live is a strange kind of work — you grind for weeks and the app looks the same to anyone using it. The win is invisible by design. There were also a couple of genuinely ugly stretches, including one where another tool I was using to move fast went and re-introduced a pattern I'd very deliberately torn out. Untangling that taught me more about Solid than any tutorial did.
But it's done, it's at parity, and a lot of things that were rough before are properly built now: account signup and password recovery on desktop and web, a real moderation inbox for community mods, right-click reporting, invite management, a role editor, a notifications inbox. The desktop app now updates itself, too — no more manual reinstalls.
The honest caveats
Two things I'd rather you hear from me than discover:
- The installers aren't OS-code-signed yet, so the first launch throws a SmartScreen / Gatekeeper warning. That's a cost-and-paperwork item, not a broken build — and it's separate from the update signing, which is in place and verified.
- Voice pop-out is temporarily off on desktop while I rework how it syncs across the new multi-window shell. Voice itself is unaffected.
What this means going forward
This was the foundation work. With desktop, web, and mobile all sitting on the same core, the pace of visible features should pick back up — because I'm not paying the rebuild tax anymore.
The vision hasn't moved an inch: a community chat platform that's honest about what it is, doesn't farm your data, and is good enough that you'd choose it on the merits. 2.0 is me making sure the foundation can actually carry that.
The repo is public if you want to poke holes in any of it.
See y'all next time.
-Redrixx