the reason what I believe is that, AI can understand react very well. so It can be beneficial for Shopify
100%
Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
231–240 of 963 posts
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#232[deleted]
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#233Earlier 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…
Bad reviews? Haha. I completely replace the software with a non Electron alternative if available.
Who cares, unless you pay?
A one star review, on the other hand, can have a material impact on the search ranking and consequently my revenue.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#234React Native is slow. Hermes VM doesn't even have JIT. If the majority of your app is native code and only a few places are stitched together via JS code that runs in the Hermes VM, then React Native is suitable for you. Look at V8 vs. Hermes performance. We use Flutter; we rarely need to write native code. We have three apps: Symbiote workout app, CalorieCodex, an AI calorie tracker app, and MacroCodex with 17,000+…
Your data is out of date. React Native performs within spitting distance of raw native now because in the last 2 years... it basically became native - it's now false dichotomy
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect we'll see a lot of large orgs doing this in the next year.
Perhaps. I can absolutely see that being more attractive especially with things like the Duo where, I assume, SwiftUI gives you a number of things "for free". That said, the massive downsides to native are: - App Store Review time, this used to be hours to 1-2 days, now it can take a week or more - In the same vein, you can do updates without waiting on native when using web technologies to build your app. We can go…
> I can absolutely see that being more attractive especially with things like the Duo where, I assume, SwiftUI gives you a number of things "for free".
Apple may not trumpet it as loudly, but these freebies are handed out in UIKit too, for cases where declarative UI is cumbersome.
Generally I've found that while SwiftUI is great for little self-contained bits of UI like table/collection view cells and simplistic template-like apps, it tends to become a bear with complex apps, so it's nice to have both options.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#236Earlier 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.
Damn, we really gotta get rid of the vibe coders. Bad things are on the horizon if we keep encouraging these naive habits.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#237Earlier 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.
Windows desktop native is WinUI 3 and Windows App SDK, for better or for worse. No amount of Rust and tokens will recreate everything you get out of the box with that stack. Native needs to feel native.
The last time Windows UI felt native was maybe Windows XP. Maaayyybe 7, if we are generous. It also has to do with sluggish or no feedback by UI widgets, due to the trend of flat everywhere.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#238Earlier 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…
First “production is down” page means you just tell codex production is down and to fix it.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you contradicted yourself. If a tool provides better value for the time spent for a company, I don’t understand how you can call it objectively bad. You can say it’s objectively bad from a technical perspective, but clearly that’s only one part of the equation.
I think they were speaking as a user. These tools create inferior products. (Still not technically objective, but true nonetheless.) That doesn't mean companies should necessarily avoid them. As a user, I always want the best possible user experience, but a company can't prioritize that above all else, and I know that.
I am so tired of existing react/electron applications being compared against imaginary, hypothetical "native" applications.
Like, it's fine to criticize something, "this component doesn't follow the OS's UI guidelines" or "this scrollbar disappears when the mouse isn't over it which is a bad UX" or whatever, but this generic "oh this is bad but if it was rewritten it would be perfect" is annoying.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#240It'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…
Speaking personally, JVM toolchain bits like Gradle being involved is a turnoff and has kept me away from KMP. Last I checked support wasn't really there yet, but I'd much rather go the other direction and use Swift Package Manager and the associated toolchain on Android.