balenaEtcher is a cross-platform Electron desktop application for flashing OS images to SD cards, USB drives, and similar removable media. In production it provides a wizard-style UI where users select a source image (local file, URL, or an existing drive), choose a target drive, and flash with pre-write safety checks and post-write verification. The architecture is a three-process Electron app: the main process manages windows, menus, auto-updates, and IPC; the renderer runs a React/Redux UI built with TypeScript and styled-components; and a privileged Node.js sidecar process, packaged separately via pkg, performs drive scanning, image metadata extraction, and the actual flashing over a WebSocket connection. Core flashing operations are delegated to etcher-sdk, while OS-specific privilege elevation is handled through sudo on Linux/macOS and UAC on Windows.