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Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

shopify.engineering

151–160 of 962 posts

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

#151

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…

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

#152
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You just install it on your phone and use the app. OP says they don't have an android phone...

No, they said they don't use android so don't know the native UX. You can test your app on the platform and confirm that the functionality all works, but how well it adheres to the platform's design language is subjective and hard to say if you aren't used to the platform.

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

#155
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I was surprised by your comments and then you do Rust to be called via Java or Kotlin and Swift?

What does your app do?

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's objectively bad because of how hot my phone is. It's subjectively bad because it's an embarrassment. Like you're seriously going to tell me something like Discord, worth 15 BILLION, cannot afford native apps? Spare me.

What really grinds my gears is Microsoft replacing native apps with Electron. Trillion dollar company who is so cash strapped they have no choice but to punt to the easy development path.

What's extra egregious there is I do understand the logic because developing for Windows is such a fucking nightmare, that they're also responsible for.

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

#157
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately theres no thanks to the suppliers of training data. US courts made sure there’s no recompense for them, and likely never will be.

Seems similar to eminent domain, but without limitations.

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

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid you are the one out of date here. App Store Review times have ballooned in the last few months. Marco Arment talked about this publically (on the ATP podcast) about how his app was stuck in review for over 2 weeks IIRC and I've seen 2 days as the minimum review time in the last few months with some taking a week or more. Yes, for a while they were doing very well and I even once had an app reviewed in <1hr…

This is only anecdotal, but I had a review on a brand new app turned around in ~6 hours 2 days ago. A lot of it has always been luck of the draw, though, granted.

I agree it's anecdotal but that's all I have to go off and global averages don't help me at all. The problem it's a complete crap-shoot. You have no way of knowing if you are going to get a quick turnaround or a long one, it has zero bearing on if it's a new app or update or the size of the update, it's completely random. I cannot plan around random which is why I've opted for web-tech-based apps (Capacitor) with OTA updates so I can get fixes out just as quick as I could get webapp updates out.

I just ran an analysis of my apps and the fastest was 8hrs (June 20th) but since then it's been trending upwards with my last 3 updates coming in at 40hrs, 67hrs, and 98hrs. These are all my apps, the company I work for has at least 2 recent updates that took over a week. That's just absurd.

If the App Store can commit to 24hrs being the max time then maybe I'd be interested but for the foreseeable future I'll "Settle" for instant updates when I have a fix ready instead of waiting on Apple. Especially with how random approvals are (not just the time, the approval itself), I'll ship a tiny fix and App Review will kick it back for some native API I've been using since version 1 that they now want more info about. I don't fancy having my businesses at the whim of Apple Review.

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

#159
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure I've seen you either at B-Sides or Polyglot... Small world...

I'll most likely be at Polyglot. I did a very small part to help organize one of the very early ones.

I'm looking forward to the next one in October.
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