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Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

shopify.engineering

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Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

#41

Post by paxys »

Waterluvian wrote: post #28

If you put every company that needs/has an app on a spectrum, there is a line somewhere that roughly divides them into two groups: where Electron/React Native/etc. makes sense or not. It's just a normal engineering decision: solving problems given limited resources. Companies have different problems and different resources. I think people in the tech community have probably also noticed that it's rather popular to ha…

And the “makes sense or not” part can change based on a bunch of factors.

It’s actually pretty common for a new company to start fully native (only iOS, few features, limited scope), then switch ro react native/electron (need to support more surfaces, features are being developed too quickly), then back to fully native (can afford individual dev teams for each platform).

Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

#42

Post by jgalt212 »

atonse wrote: post #31

We did the same thing - had 90% of it overnight. Then spent a few days in the background tweaking for polish. Our app is smaller, and has about 15-20 screens. I started at about 12:30am by giving codex a goal and it inventoried every screen based on the react native code, then created android and iOS directories, used maestro (I had already set up this tooling for a previous personal app build a few weeks prior), and…

And there's no proprietary IP in your company's app that you don't mind being sucked up into the training data?

Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

#43

Post by pkaler »

I'm sitting here at my desk overlooking Cordova Street. The street that Apache Cordova is named after. I've seen this debate for almost two decades now.

Teams jump on the latest cross-platform framework assuming that it will reduce headcount cost at the expense of having a lowest-common denominator app on each platform.

The latter is true but the former is false.

What ends up happening is that teams start as 20 iOS engineers & 20 Android engineers. They adopt something like React Native. Then you end up with a team of 20 product engineers and 20 tooling and framework engineers.

I've seen that countless times in the last two decades.

Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

#45

Post by exe34 »

greenowl wrote: post #36
atonse wrote: post #31

We did the same thing - had 90% of it overnight. Then spent a few days in the background tweaking for polish. Our app is smaller, and has about 15-20 screens. I started at about 12:30am by giving codex a goal and it inventoried every screen based on the react native code, then created android and iOS directories, used maestro (I had already set up this tooling for a previous personal app build a few weeks prior), and…

And people say AI isn't taking SWE jobs...

It ported overnight. I don't think it would create from scratch without a lot of hand holding.

Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

#46

Post by exe34 »

jgalt212 wrote: post #42
atonse wrote: post #31

We did the same thing - had 90% of it overnight. Then spent a few days in the background tweaking for polish. Our app is smaller, and has about 15-20 screens. I started at about 12:30am by giving codex a goal and it inventoried every screen based on the react native code, then created android and iOS directories, used maestro (I had already set up this tooling for a previous personal app build a few weeks prior), and…

And there's no proprietary IP in your company's app that you don't mind being sucked up into the training data?

The value of most companies/apps are in the relationship with the customers, so it's the database, not the code.

Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

#48

Post by StrLght »

giebisch wrote: post #17

Their reasoning makes sense. I'd love to read a follow-up and their thoughts in half a year.

If you expect a story about how this migration to native went from technical PoV, they've already shared this: https://shopify.engineering/shop-app-migration

It sounds pretty solid, so I wouldn't expect anything to change in just 6 months.

Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

#49

Post by greenowl »

exe34 wrote: post #45
greenowl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And people say AI isn't taking SWE jobs...

It ported overnight. I don't think it would create from scratch without a lot of hand holding.

Previous company I worked for would have (and did) hire dedicated swift/java mobile developers to build and maintain ios and android native versions (largely porting functionality from an existing web application)

Not anymore.

Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

#50

Post by sprite »

alostpuppy wrote: post #37
atonse wrote: post #31

We did the same thing - had 90% of it overnight. Then spent a few days in the background tweaking for polish. Our app is smaller, and has about 15-20 screens. I started at about 12:30am by giving codex a goal and it inventoried every screen based on the react native code, then created android and iOS directories, used maestro (I had already set up this tooling for a previous personal app build a few weeks prior), and…

This has been my conclusion as well. Agentic workflows drops the effort level in keeping two native code bases in sync.

Same conclusion here. My current preferred setup is native for iOS and Android with common core in rust exposed through uniffi
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