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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

#191

Post by enraged_camel »

eleventen wrote: post #106
mattm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a type of project that likely wouldn't have been done before AI

Of course it would. Supply and demand. Some companies would decide not to bother. Others would decide it was worthwhile. The limited pool of supply (app developers) would be distributed across demand.

>> Some companies would decide not to bother. Others would decide it was worthwhile.

The parent's point is that AI lowers the cost/benefit ratio drastically, by reducing the cost. So companies that would have shied away from projects like this pre-AI are now pulling the trigger without much hesitation.

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

#192

Post by user43928 »

asdfsa32 wrote: post #164
user43928 wrote: post #95

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.

I am using Gemini as well as Opus on a somewhat small project in React Native and I can not imagine this thing being able to build the whole thing on its own without it being a dumbpster fire. Can you share some details of how you work? What models? What harness?

I use Codex and Claude Code desktop apps. I generally use only the SOTA, now Astra and Fable 5.1, Opus 5 when Fable runs out.

I don't know if Gemini is suitable.

I had few issues with my native iOS app, the results are just decent after a few iterations, the models do what I ask them to do. Where do you see the problem?

The LOC for my app is now at almost 200k + 110k lines of test code.

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

#194

Post by gman83 »

echelon wrote: post #109
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…

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.

I'm building an app that targets Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux. There's no way I'm going to be maintaining 5 different codebases, even with LLMs.

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

#195

Post by collingreen »

fourside wrote: post #67
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?

Seriously! What a bonkers thing to claim. "I had codex use maestro so I assume it made Android work well and idiomatically".

It's a fine project to do but clearly they put zero value on being familiar with the project's codebase/stack and ecosystem, which makes me feel fear in my heart when I imagine the first "production is down" page coming in. I already hated mobile because it's so much harder to maintain than web (and I don't do any spyware or IAP so no benefits for me there); this yolo approach would give me constant dread.

It shows that at least some software development is moving away from code and to product management instead. I'm not passing judgement on that; I actually think that's great for a lot of software. It is interesting to see the shift happening though and will be fun to see if the general quality of software noticeably changes over the next few years.

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

#196

Post by weightedreply »

Isn't it silly that this even needs to be a conversation? Shouldn't we be able to write in any language we want and have the bindings for it to work cross platform? And shouldn't AI aid in building those cross-platform tools?

Maybe React Native isn't the right choice - but two tech stacks for virtually identical interfaces is dumb. Three stacks if you include browsers.

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

#197

Post by atonse »

fourside wrote: post #67
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?

We have people on the team that are android users. I just meant that I don't want to evaluate whether it feels "native" as I personally am not an Android user.

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

#198

Post by tzone »

With latest AI models, we will most likely see shift back to just fully Native apps even for smaller teams. This is type of stuff that AI models do really well, if you get a particular feature or even a bigger app change done in one platform, you can just tell Opus or Fable to replicate to the other platforms and in almost all cases it will just do it as well as most human teams would have done it.

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

#199

Post by atonse »

greenowl wrote: post #49
exe34 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It ported overnight. I don't think it would create from scratch without a lot of hand holding.

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.

What's more likely (as others have said) is that the other thousand companies that can't afford to have dedicated staff would've just used React Native. So no jobs were lost, they weren't there in the first place. The places that have dedicated Swift/Java devs can now be more ambitious in what they build.
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