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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

#61

Post by Waterluvian »

stickfigure wrote: post #54
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.

There’s risk to doing anything. There’s risk to doing nothing. A bit off topic but my perception is that organizations bias towards doing something more often than they should.

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

#62

Post by schrodinger »

joshstrange wrote: post #15
ceejayoz wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect we'll see a lot of large orgs doing this in the next year.

Perhaps. I can absolutely see that being more attractive especially with things like the Duo where, I assume, SwiftUI gives you a number of things "for free". That said, the massive downsides to native are: - App Store Review time, this used to be hours to 1-2 days, now it can take a week or more - In the same vein, you can do updates without waiting on native when using web technologies to build your app. We can go…

https://www.runway.team/appreviewtimes

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

#64

Post by organsnyder »

aatd86 wrote: post #32
lackoftactics wrote: post #7

I believe this will be overall trend in industry. Dropping React Native and Flutter for native

That would be a huge mistake if we expect many more hardware and OS running them efficiently than just iOS and Android. Best is to have an IR. Now maybe that IR can be turnt into native code. But we shouldn't be constrained. As an incoming framework author, SwiftUI is problematic for instance because it has a programming model which is dated. And I don't particularly enjoy the language either. Looked fine at first an…

> That would be a huge mistake if we expect many more hardware and OS running them efficiently than just iOS and Android.

Is that something we should be engineering for right now?

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

#65

Post by schrodinger »

negative10xer wrote: post #59

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

Before and after LLMs.

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

#66

Post by stwrt »

exe34 wrote: post #46
jgalt212 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Definitely agree. Most developers could build a basic Twitter or Facebook clone. The hard part is getting the users, content, and relationships that make the product worth coming back to.

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

#67

Post by fourside »

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…

How are you evaluating the Android build if you don’t use Android and you don’t know Kotlin?

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

#68

Post by Rohansi »

joshstrange wrote: post #15
ceejayoz wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect we'll see a lot of large orgs doing this in the next year.

Perhaps. I can absolutely see that being more attractive especially with things like the Duo where, I assume, SwiftUI gives you a number of things "for free". That said, the massive downsides to native are: - App Store Review time, this used to be hours to 1-2 days, now it can take a week or more - In the same vein, you can do updates without waiting on native when using web technologies to build your app. We can go…

You get all of those, to some extent, if you use React Native. You still need to do reviews for significant changes due to app store rules but you can OTA update most changes without waiting on a review. Even web support is there.

There are cons to targetting web/PWA too. Push notifications work but Safari on iOS only allows them if the user adds your website to their home screen. It also doesn't support prompting the user to install the PWA so you have to instruct your users to tap the Share button, tap View more, and then tap Add to Home Screen. And as soon as they tap the Share button the menu opens on top of your instructions so they need to remember the steps to continue. It's hard to defend this behavior because the user will still need to allow notification permission when they open your PWA from their home screen. It's an unnecessary hurdle.

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

#69

Post by wwalexander »

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…

Using cross-platform web technology is absolutely a nuanced engineering decision that is the right one for many businesses. What is categorically bad is bundling a standalone browser runtime for every single service, wasting user’s storage and memory when you could just have a website in a browser.

Is there any major browser now that doesn’t support saving websites as apps? Electron is simply a suboptimal and incorrect way of producing web apps.

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

#70

Post by boringg »

augment_me wrote: post #58
greenowl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While I agree with that statement -- that is also a lot of jobs. We have a lot of humans -- not every single developer sits in the innovation seat. The fewer the jobs available the less employable humans.

I think that rewrite - if AI enabled - owes its thanks to the legion of individuals who put their code up on the internet in the first place.

Weird times.

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