Discord is working on a native version of its Windows on Arm communication app. An early development preview version is available for testers, which precedes the full release of Arm64 for compatible Arm-enabled devices.
Discord spokesperson Claudia Fellerman confirmed to The Verge that the company is working on a Windows build for Arm, but it’s in the early stages of development, so it’s not clear when it will be released to the public.
Although you can install Discord on Qualcomm-based Copilot Plus devices, the emulation often freezes and is slow to load chat history or channels. You can also use unofficial Discord clients that are native to Windows on Arm. In recent weeks, I’ve been testing an early version of Discord compiled for Windows on Arm, and it’s like using the program on an Intel device. There are no lags in navigation and the performance is much better.
Once Discord becomes officially available for Windows on Arm, it will join the hundreds of apps that are native to the latest Copilot Plus PCs powered by Qualcomm processors. Emulation is generally a good experience for lightweight Windows apps, but for apps like Discord and Premiere Pro, you really need the native version for the best performance.
The Windows on Arm app tracking site currently has 731 apps registered, of which nearly 42 percent have a native version for Arm64. Less than 10 percent of the tracked programs are not supported on Windows on Arm, and about 31 percent are supported by the Microsoft Prism emulator. Microsoft has managed to convince a significant number of app developers to create their own apps for Arm64, including Chrome, Dropbox, Zoom, Photoshop, Spotify, and others.
