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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

#221

Post by nicce »

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…

This is probably the end now. People don't debate anymore whether they should write only in assembly vs. in C. Sometimes new abstractions emerge and they replace something completely. This time the abstraction was LLM.

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

#222

Post by parentheses »

The underlying problem is that it's difficult to make a principled decision. So, it's ripe for SEO mining and such fuzzy takes happen.

The meta point of the article, I agree with though. The line is moving and AI makes having multiple platforms with code specific to them faster. Getting them right is still difficult.

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

#223

Post by wilsonnb3 »

polloRebozado wrote: post #202

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?

React Native apps are not webview based like Electron, they use native components. Arguably it is more native than flutter, which uses its own components designed to mirror native ones on Android and iOS.

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

#224

Post by bluGill »

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…

The problem with tomorrow is sunk costs. There are many places I wish we had made a difference decision in the past - but we need to balance that with cost to make changes when what we have works okay.

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

#225

Post by user43928 »

nicce wrote: post #219
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.

> You just install it on your phone and use the app. Some people on the cybersecurity side are starting to cry....

I have been getting these comments often here, including concerns about my non existent backend's security.

Last time, when I pointed out that the attack surface for mobile apps is typically very small, some users started to talk about zero day vulnerabilities in the OS's media handling, as if it was a concern for my app implementation.

I found the concerns again wildly overblown.

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

#226

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

jkubicek wrote: post #189
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That isn't a web app.

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

#229

Post by user43928 »

croes wrote: post #209
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.

> 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.

That's the part covered by the other model's review. That together with manually verifying the functionality results in output that works.

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

#230

Post by hermitwriter »

rvz wrote: post #80

Agreed, the whole of the Javascript / TypeScript ecosystem has caused a slop hellscape of workarounds, half-backed fixes and have exposed short-comings in the ecosystem. Perhaps these languages do not work well as they are not designed to run efficiently on mobile devices. Now that we have libraries such as SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose, React Native no longer makes sense to use. Now we should also move away from Elect…

So disagree. The benefits you get from leveraging a framework as as important today as they have ever been -- strong frameworks, fewer tokens, faster progress.
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