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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

#51

Post by mattm »

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...

This is a type of project that likely wouldn't have been done before AI

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

#52

Post by rvz »

railka wrote: post #34

IMHO, now is a great time to use native Swift/Kotlin code alongside shared Rust code via UniFFI

So you want to review and maintain code in 3 separate languages?

Sounds like a complete waste of tokens with the worst case of just quickly building more technical debt, three times.

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

#53

Post by [deleted] »

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...

[deleted]

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

#54

Post by stickfigure »

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…

These takes are also a bit premature. Wait until the new apps have rolled out and users are happy.

Most likely this will work out fine, but big rewrites like this have a big enough chance of going off the rails that I wouldn't shout success from the rooftops just yet. I'm sure Digg engineering was proud of their rewrite too.

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

#55

Post by organsnyder »

greenowl wrote: post #49
exe34 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's fairly rare. Most companies would use a compatibility layer instead.

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

#56

Post by mcsniff »

I use Shopify app every day, multiple times a day to run my business and it has always been buggy and inconsistent for me on Android, and I don't expect this will make it any better, especially with more AI in the mix, but we shall see.

Who wants to bet there still won't be a dark mode?

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

#57

Post by vendiddy »

asimovDev wrote: post #12

Dropping React and going back to raw JavaScript next? I am still mourning pre-React GitHub. Maybe rose-tinted glasses, but it was so pleasant to use

I would attribute that more to culture.

For example https://diffs.com/ is built in React and it's basically instant.

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

#58

Post by augment_me »

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...

This is an incredibly boring task. Nothing new, just rewrite everything to just see it all rewritten again in 1 year. Perfect for LLMs and something humans shouldn't do.

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

#59

Post by negative10xer »

I remember their blog post claiming how much of a win it was to move over to react native and maintain high performance. They even listed their performance metrics. At that time I was a mobile developer for an e-commerce business and the metrics they were proud to share were unacceptable on our native apps. Here they are coming full circle

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

#60

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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