Announced August 1, the Tauri 2.0 release candidate has followed more than a year and a half of beta versions and more than a year of alpha releases. The project said the long alpha and beta states happened in part because Tauri 2.0 was overpromised as having “mobile as a first-class citizen.” The project’s developers found they can only build the foundation for mobile on their own and need to iterate on this together with the community and Tauri adopters. There are still mobile plugins in Tauri’s official repository; apps have been built for Android and iOS via Tauri.

Tauri provides a framework for building desktop applications in Rust that have a small footprint—a smaller than apps built with the Electron framework. With Tauri, developers can integrate any front end framework that compiles to HTML, JavaScript, and CSS for building user experiences while using languages such as Rust, Kotliin, and Swift for the back-end logic.

The stable version of Tauri 2.0 is due later this month. Tauri 2.0 follows Tauri 1.7.0 from July 1, which featured improved shell API performance and a custom Windows codesign script. Also in Tauri 2.0, the Tauri CLI can connect to the built-in development server running on localhost when targeting Android or iOS. Previously, this only was possible when developing a desktop application. Developers no longer need to expose their development server on a public network.