Missing out on flawless App Intents integration could be business risk for Shopify once people get used to doing everything from a central chat interface, including shopping. I guess it's the real reason for the switch.
Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
171–180 of 962 posts
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think people in the tech community have probably also noticed that it's rather popular to have an absolute opinion on the goodness or badness of these tools. I don't think that's necessarily true. Nuance is a thing. These tools are bad, objectively! They give inferior user experiences, and waste resources (ever more important now with RAM prices what they are). But that doesn't mean I can't understand or even agr…
I don't have any actual experience with React Native and Electron, but with that caveat out of the way I personally think tools get far too much blame that should be on developers. For an example that I actually have experience with, React very frequently gets criticized for being slow, heavy etc. React is not slow. I can make (have made) fast and snappy websites in react. React can render at more than 60fps if neces…
Most enterprises are comprised of a high proportion of shit developers. So you need to work with what you got
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think people in the tech community have probably also noticed that it's rather popular to have an absolute opinion on the goodness or badness of these tools. I don't think that's necessarily true. Nuance is a thing. These tools are bad, objectively! They give inferior user experiences, and waste resources (ever more important now with RAM prices what they are). But that doesn't mean I can't understand or even agr…
None of this matters anymore. We have LLMs. It's easy to build native everything now without much resource expenditure. Android will be Kotlin. iOS will be Swift. Desktop and server will be Rust. Web will be TypeScript / React for now, but maybe one day WASM. LLMs are the target now.
Windows desktop native is WinUI 3 and Windows App SDK, for better or for worse. No amount of Rust and tokens will recreate everything you get out of the box with that stack. Native needs to feel native.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#174this AI stuff is goin crazy
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#175If 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…
> I think people in the tech community have probably also noticed that it's rather popular to have an absolute opinion on the goodness or badness of these tools.
For a while it seemed that having deeply held, nuance-free opinions about technologies was a sign of being wise and experienced.
The slightly lighter version of this was having near-absolute convictions but leaving a tiny exception for extreme cases to try to demonstrate that you weren’t being unreasonable.
These would usually follow trends when something would spread like a meme. Recent examples include “Everyone should use SQLite for everything” and the ironically closely related “Just use PostgreSQL for everything”. The typical pseudo-nuance would be “unless you have FAANG scale” to imply that there is no nuance until your user base includes most of the developed world.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#176Dropping 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.
Is it? I looked at the source but it doesn't appear to be react. It has a React API but also a "vanilla js" API and when I looked at the code it seems to be doing everything by hand:
https://github.com/pierrecomputer/pierre/blob/main/packages/...
... albeit using React inspired terminology like props and hydration.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Same result here just using plain Opus 4.8+. I had a web ap with a PWA approach. Now I have an iOS app written in Swift/SwiftUI and an Android app in Kotlin in the appstores. I do not know how to code a single line of Swift or Kotlin. You just test the app and iterate with the AI over it until it is stable and does what it should.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#178If 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…
> I think people in the tech community have probably also noticed that it's rather popular to have an absolute opinion on the goodness or badness of these tools. For a while it seemed that having deeply held, nuance-free opinions about technologies was a sign of being wise and experienced. The slightly lighter version of this was having near-absolute convictions but leaving a tiny exception for extreme cases to try t…
Strong opinions considered harmful
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#179Earlier 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?
Are you saying you don’t trust ZDR claims from inference providers? They don’t care about your code. There’s more and better data on the public web.
Isn't ZDR only the case if you "opt out" through a setting? Lots of opportunities to make a mistake here, or for the LLM provider to play games. You could be unaware of the setting. The provider could reset the setting upon subscription lapse/renewal, application update, model release, etc. A developer could accidentally use their personal subscription (w/ setting on) on a work codebase.
Also what's the timing on this setting's effectiveness? What if before you knew to "opt out" you used the agent for a refactor and your entire repo got sucked up in inference? But then you opt out the next day? Is it too late?
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#180Makes sense in the LLM age.
With cheap/fast code, it's easy to support multiple software stacks since most of the abstract engineering problems are already solved.
Code - especially straightforward low-level code - is so cheap and easy to write now that some people are building their own version control systems, game engines, and other low-level tooling.
Thus, some of the most demanding, human-centric work in software dev right now - where we now spend more time than coding - is in technical PM, UI/UX, devops, and overall architecture. The decision-making and design aspects of the job.
Exciting times.