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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

#181

Post by collingreen »

suriyaG wrote: post #129
echelon wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

not sure why you're getting downvoted. but if you're building even very popular applications, it is quite easy to see how LLMs are very well suited for this type of consistency job. - they follow instructions quite well. - are tireless at doing mechanical ports between languages and frameworks. - Can understand a new ecosystem quite well.

I didn't downvote but I'd expect downvotes for a completely unnuanced thought terminating cliche that ignores everything in the thread. AI fanaticism doesn't help but lots of people don't get downvoted for that alone.

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

#182

Post by JeremyNT »

kelnos wrote: post #81
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…

> 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…

> These tools are bad, objectively! They give inferior user experiences, and waste resources (ever more important now with RAM prices what they are).

They can be "bad" in some dimensions (as you mentioned) while being "good" in others (dev productivity).

These frameworks didn't become popular for no reason. They have value. The parts that are "good" can easily outweigh the parts that are "objectively bad" when they enable a smaller team to get things out the door they would have had trouble shipping otherwise.

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

#183

Post by Aurornis »

Waterluvian wrote: post #178
Aurornis wrote: post #175

Earlier 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. 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

Blind conviction without nuanced considered harmful.

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

#186

Post by uncle_kostya »

An Android developer since 2010 here.

I've always been wary of React Native, because my impression is that it hides nuances of the underlying framework. You may be fine implementing 90% of your app but then need that last 10% and may get stuck.

But then I'm also wary of the recent trend by Google to create higher level frameworks on top of native Android APIs. It seems that these days for every Android API family, there is a Google framework that gives you a higher level API. I don't really understand it - is Google admitting that the quality of native Android APIs has eroded? Do they think developers are too inexperienced to deal with native Android APIs?

I'm also not sure I understand the how reasonably large companies consider two native apps to be too expensive. A startup may have a hard time funding both and may need to choose, but an established business should consider not only costs but also the better quality of user experience that native apps provide - that has to count for something.

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

#189

Post by jkubicek »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #163
kelnos wrote: post #81

Earlier 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…

A well built native app can still serve as a vector for harvesting personal data in ways you cannot control. A web app is inherently superior because of its security envelope.

A React Native app would have all the same access to your personal data that a native app would

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

#190

Post by wccrawford »

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...

While I mostly agree with you, this is the kind of thing that might not have been done if the AI couldn't do the heavy lifting.

They had previously chosen React Native because it was easier for programmers to keep it updated, since it was really just 1 codebase. With AI, those same programmers can do the more difficult version, keeping the native apps updated separately.

So did it kill a job, or did it make it possible for the existing programmers to do it better?

It's the kind of thing that is really hard to determine in general, but here, it really does sound like they only made the change because it became possible with existing resources. They would not have done it otherwise.

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