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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

#201

Post by mustafa01ali »

fnikacevic wrote: post #5
fnthawar2 wrote: post #2

We 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.

Any education required for engineers to switch to native or the agents are handling the details on their own? Wondering if architecture or the new languages require ramp up.

Definitely, we invested in ramping up teams on native before going all in.

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

#202

Post by polloRebozado »

I have not coded any mobile apps, I understand the downsides of using react native/electron due to them being web apps but what about things like Kotlin multi platform or flutter? Aren't this frameworks supposed to allow your to have 1 codebase and the apps be truly native instead of web apps?

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

#204

Post by jatins »

collingreen wrote: post #195
fourside wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's a fine project to do but clearly they put zero value on being familiar with the project's codebase/stack and ecosystem,

As much as I dislike it, I think that's the future of _all_ non-critical software (think social media, crms, CI, food delivery etc). Leadership in many companies is explicitly asking employees to have multiple agents running through the day and that will lead to this.

Read this for example: https://www.uber.com/in/en/blog/efficient-software-factory/ . A very useful system, I am sure. But when you have AI at every layer from code to review to triaging, rest assured AI is the only know who knows your system. And you better hope it's not telling you that something is load bearing during an incident.

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

#205

Post by moronicles »

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?

[dead]

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

#207

Post by Shorel »

user43928 wrote: post #84
wwalexander wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using cross-platform web technology is absolutely a nuanced engineering decision that is the right one for many businesses. What is categorically bad is bundling a standalone browser runtime for every single service, wasting user’s storage and memory when you could just have a website in a browser. Is there any major browser now that doesn’t support saving websites as apps? Electron is simply a suboptimal and incorre…

That decision is easy: do users leave bad reviews for bundling a few hundred MB of Chromium? Do they leave bad reviews if your app malfunctions due to the system webview behaving differently than the Chromium version you tested with? Forget about saving websites as apps, no one does that. Not sure if it works on Desktop Safari, it certainly doesn't on iOS Safari. Not even persistent storage is offered for PWAs. Apple…

Bad reviews?

Haha. I completely replace the software with a non Electron alternative if available.

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

#208

Post by iBelieve »

It's interesting that they don't mention Kotlin Multiplatform or any sort of shared core logic between their iOS and Android apps. Seems like maybe the apps are fully independent codebases but with shared specifications and tests? They say that agents:

> Dramatically reduced the cost of maintaining parity between platforms through shared specifications, tests, and review checkpoints

I've used Kotlin Multiplatform on a mobile project built back before AI coding took off, and it was super nice to have shared core logic between the apps and there weren't really any downsides on the Android side, but on the iOS side it was definitely an extra layer that didn't feel fully native.

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

#209

Post by croes »

user43928 wrote: post #95
fourside wrote: post #67

Earlier 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.

> You just install it on your phone and use the app.

That‘s how you check functionality but that’s not how you get the bugs in the code.

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

#210

Post by eek2121 »

wwalexander wrote: post #69
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…

Using cross-platform web technology is absolutely a nuanced engineering decision that is the right one for many businesses. What is categorically bad is bundling a standalone browser runtime for every single service, wasting user’s storage and memory when you could just have a website in a browser. Is there any major browser now that doesn’t support saving websites as apps? Electron is simply a suboptimal and incorre…

Sure, cross-platform frameworks were great. I do think LLMs are changing the game, however. If you have a robust set of tests, it's much easier to maintain native versions of an app, compared to the past.
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