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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

#251

Post by Perz1val »

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....

Why? The api has to be secure. Mobile os keeps the app safe. Where is the attack surface?

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

#252

Post by weakfish »

Waterluvian wrote: post #178
Aurornis wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. For a while it seemed that having deeply held, nuance-free opinions about technologies was a sign of being wise and experienced. The slightly lighter version of this was having near-absolute convictions but leaving a tiny exception for extreme cases to try t…

Strong opinions considered harmful

Strong opinions tightly held

I try as hard as I can to have strong opinions, loosely held

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

#254

Post by robertlagrant »

tonic_note wrote: post #243

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 ap…

You always still needed a specialist per-platform even if most of the code was RN or KMM[0]. But I agree - a thousand not-great mobile apps sprang from this idea.

[0] I always thought the best answer was something like KMM to do all the backend comms and local data model in a shared way, and then a bespoke UI building on what that shared code exposed.

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

#255

Post by chis »

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....

Are there cybersecurity concerns in the frontend? I would have thought you have to assume the client is untrusted and only do security work on the backend

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

#256

Post by Culonavirus »

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....

They better start a proper hydration regime because they'll be crying a lot.

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

#258

Post by chis »

asdfsa32 wrote: post #164
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.

I am using Gemini as well as Opus on a somewhat small project in React Native and I can not imagine this thing being able to build the whole thing on its own without it being a dumbpster fire. Can you share some details of how you work? What models? What harness?

> Opus

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

#259

Post by bluGill »

rafaelmn wrote: post #245
bluGill wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I can't count how many times I've said "this is really bad, I it is worth rewriting to fix all the issues", only to discover that there were good reasons for all the past decisions and so we end up with the same mess as before - except that now I know what it must be that way.

Not always, but very often people in the past had good reason for what they did.

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

#260

Post by SwellJoe »

ergocoder wrote: post #244

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.

Even a single person can now build/maintain native apps. It's literally a day of effort for an experienced dev working with the best current models to port an app to a new native platform. Maybe another day or two to walk through wiring up all the test harnesses needed to prove the app is working well without a human having to click everything. Until recently you'd still have to spend a bunch of time on making sure the UI looked and felt right, but models now have good enough vision capabilities to where even that can mostly be automated.

And, honestly, the cost of tracking React over time has always been higher than the cost of tracking native deployment options, which move more slowly and usually with more care than React, where breaking backward compatibility is just another Tuesday. I don't think the promise of React Native being an almost-free "native" app actually pans out in reality. I've never maintained a large React Native app, but from following some apps that are, it seems like it introduces a sizable amount of technical debt that you pay over time. So, in exchange for worse software you also get worse maintenance costs.

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