Summary
- Discord now offers an Arm-native desktop app for Windows Arm PCs.
- A native app avoids the overhead of the Windows Prism translator and the limitations of the web app.
- Discord for Arm PCs is available for download now.
Good news for Discord fans using Arm PCs — the popular communication app now has an Arm-native version. This should translate to better performance if you prefer the desktop app.
Discord is secretly one of the best note-taking apps I’ve ever used
Try it before you judge me.
Native Discord for Arm is a big deal
No more Prism
There was no big announcement — Discord quietly snuck the addition into the download menu on its website. However, the change is significant for users on Arm PCs (think Snapdragon X chips).
Until now, you’ve been able to use it on Arm PCs, but you’d have to run the x64 version through Windows’ Prism translator (which allows you to run x64 apps on Arm devices) or rely on the browser version. Prism technically works, but there are performance costs — the tool essentially translates the code on the fly, so startup speed, CPU usage, and battery life can all take a hit when using it.
No more web app limitations
The web version of Discord also technically works (and some of us actually prefer it), but again, there are limitations. The biggest one is probably the lack of global hotkeys for push-to-talk when Discord isn’t in focus, but screen sharing and notifications are also limited with the web version, and game activity status doesn’t work at all. Plus, some people just prefer native apps — I know I usually do.
Now, thanks to this new native Arm app, users on the platform no longer need to compromise. You can get the full Discord experience without the extra overhead of Prism (speaking of overhead, make sure to clear your Discord cache now and then).
Prism is great, but can’t replace native apps
It’s 2026 — app developers need to get on board
Prism (and similar tools like Apple’s Rosetta 2) are excellent for what they are, but they’re not perfect by any means. In Apple’s case, Rosetta 2 is actually being phased out — it was introduced to ease the company’s transition to Apple Silicon, but Apple is moving to sunset the feature to push app developers to create native apps or risk incompatibility.
The Windows situation is a bit different. With Windows, Arm is just one option, so there’s less pressure on devs to code native apps. Unfortunately, this means that some apps won’t get the native treatment, and users end up paying for that. While Prism has gotten better over the years, there’s still a performance cost for using it, and this is a disadvantage for Windows on Arm.
Hopefully, more and more Arm holdouts will follow Discord’s path here and get those native versions released.
The Discord app for ARM64 PCs is available now.