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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

#211

Post by Shorel »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #112
user43928 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's funny how folks can't even get that number right. Depending on how much you care to optimize, Electron adds 50 to 80 MB to your application. Those multi hundreds of megabyte apps? Yeah that's not because of electron, that's things like "we couldn't be bothered to actually think about the assets we bundled in". 100 uncompressed 16 bit PNG? Sure why not. 20MB worth of fonts because we don't like the built in ones…

Are you defending Electron apps? The audacity :)

Bruno consumes 300MB in RAM. The alternative I am using consumes 25 MB and it is much faster.

The difference is not because some uncompressed PNG or some fonts, it's the Electron architecture that is wasteful, by design.

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

#212

Post by woah »

pkaler wrote: post #43

I'm sitting here at my desk overlooking Cordova Street. The street that Apache Cordova is named after. I've seen this debate for almost two decades now. Teams jump on the latest cross-platform framework assuming that it will reduce headcount cost at the expense of having a lowest-common denominator app on each platform. The latter is true but the former is false. What ends up happening is that teams start as 20 iOS e…

> I'm sitting here at my desk overlooking Cordova Street. The street that Apache Cordova is named after. I've seen this debate for almost two decades now.

The debate has been taking place on the actual street?

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

#214

Post by nemomarx »

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.

Then why aren't people doing that? Microsoft has as much access to cheap tokens as any software company around, right, so you'd think they would be leading the way.

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

#215

Post by bakugo »

gargs wrote: post #203

What I want to know is if the agents are so good that they can convert React Native code to native with amazing efficiencies along the way, what's stopping them from improving React Native itself?

Translating code from one language/framework to another is easy for AI to do, as it does not involve solving any novel problems. Making improvements to existing complex codebases is much harder.

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

#216

Post by ricardobeat »

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…

I assume having Kotlin and Jetpack Compose makes it much easier than it was back around 2020?

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

#217

Post by cosmic_cheese »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #144
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #125

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.

The thing that makes Microsoft's case particularly annoying is that they have demonstrated how they can develop half-decent Electron apps with VS Code, but have simply elected not to with anything that's not VS Code.

Like yes, I'd prefer native and MS can certainly afford to take that path, but they can't even be bothered to make sure that most of their Electron apps land on the upper half of the quality spectrum.

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

#218

Post by collabs »

embedding-shape wrote: post #147
paxys wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the “makes sense or not” part can change based on a bunch of factors. It’s actually pretty common for a new company to start fully native (only iOS, few features, limited scope), then switch ro react native/electron (need to support more surfaces, features are being developed too quickly), then back to fully native (can afford individual dev teams for each platform).

Yeah, massive parts of our community and ecosystem miss that something can be right today, and wrong tomorrow, and having to change along with your users and needs is OK. You'll never be able to anticipate what the business needs in the future, so stop pretending your software design can be done once and then just coast on that, because that's typically not how a software project should be run long-term or even mediu…

In my experience it comes from the business and people who think if we need to touch the same code twice in the same month it is somehow a moral failing of some kind.

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

#219

Post by nicce »

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.

Some people on the cybersecurity side are starting to cry....

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

#220

Post by atonse »

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…

I wrote every single line of the react native app we ported, and maintained it for 9 years. So suffice to say, I'm familiar with the code.

But I am going to always prioritize the user experience over a developer (like myself)'s need for satisfaction to see code. And a pure native app is _always_ going to behave better than react native.

This gives me a chance to do that.

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