I believe this will be overall trend in industry. Dropping React Native and Flutter for native
Yep. Flutter has been dead-end for a while. RN won't last through 2027.
Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
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Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#92[dead]
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#93We don’t hold on to a decision just because it was successful at the time. When a core assumption changes, we’re willing to go back and ask whether it’s still the right call. LLMs changed one of the core assumptions behind our 2020 decision, so we reevaluated our mobile stack from first principles. What we found led us back to native.
Thanks for the write-up. I'm curious if there's a shared core between the iOS and Android apps (e.g. KMP or Rust), and if so, what that looks like.
Also, any plans to open source Helix?
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#94Who could have guessed it!
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#95We 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?
You just install it on your phone and use the app.
Maintainability concerns are entirely overblown by people who don't use agentic AI to develop large mobile apps, but anyway give their opinion as if they had that experience.
I put in a few hundred hours, and I reached the same conclusion as Shopify. With reviews from other models and then a manual QA pass the result is fully usable.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#96I guess expect no new features on mobile until their token budget gets through all the screens?
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Really? I’ve worked with plenty of companies that had separate native iOS & Android teams. I don’t know any that use a compatibility layer. Unless by compatibility layer, you mean a web view.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#98im not a fan of react native per se , but this reasoning does not add up.
they are going to "delete an app" because they got some LLM to slop out 2 apps?
The architect who wrote that is batshit and will be unemployed after this blows up in his face.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#99if native became easier to tackle with coding agents, react native would have been even more easier to scale. this decision doesn't sit well with me.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#100Truth is the Shopify app is simple enough to get right by a model. Lots of things hare simpler to get right in native code, so it is to be reiterated - a lot of interpreter code/libs is going down the drain, along with the devs that write it. These are not needed anymore.
And, in all honesty, the difficult part with many projects is the bootstrap, the scaffolding, not the continuous dev. Agentic dev. made this a piece of cake.