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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

#241

Post by suriyaG »

nemomarx wrote: post #214
suriyaG wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm sure these things are in the plans from upper management.

we'll know when the next layoffs hit.

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

#242

Post by asdfman123 »

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…

Much of Hacker News seems to be incapable of understanding the average user doesn't care about memory use at all, beyond a few extreme examples.

You don't need to argue with me about it: I'm not the average user. But they really do not care at all in most cases.

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

#243

Post by tonic_note »

Models have gotten a lot better at generating native iOS apps. The main appeal of RN was being able to leverage your web devs for mobile dev. that's what I did at my last company. And it's fine for a startup, but eventually you want dedicated native engineers bc each platform really deserves its own technical masters who can optimize for it.

But now that all code is generated, there's little upside to having an RN app... just start native. Your devs are barely going to be writing code anyway.

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

#244

Post by ergocoder »

A companies with thousands of engineers should simply go native.

Write once, deploy everywhere like React Native mainly benefits small teams and startups who are okay with building 90/10 solutions.

At the shopify's scale, they would want to go advance for every corner of the apps and use cases, and only native allows that.

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

#245

Post by rafaelmn »

bluGill wrote: post #224
embedding-shape wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's also a recency bias, where you ignore how valuable some decision was in the past and ignore the fact that you maybe wouldn't even get to the place you are if "you made a different decision in the past".

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

#246

Post by jwlake »

kelnos wrote: post #81
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…

> 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…

A badly made native app is worse than a well built react-native app. There are plenty of anti-patterns that will ruin your native app.

In stories like this its much more likely that they just got sick of refactoring a big ugly code base so got buy in to throw it all away and starting over and the justification is native. Wait like 5 years and there will be a new react-native corss platform app because the native apps have too much cruft. Assuming we still have human in the loop then.

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

#250

Post by ndbe »

dakolli wrote: post #236
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.

Damn, we really gotta get rid of the vibe coders. Bad things are on the horizon if we keep encouraging these naive habits.

Yes, what type of "engineering" is this? "I click the button and I see if it works or not" holy shit.
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