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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

#271

Post by mannyv »

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…

Absolute opinions are simple and travel better on media.

"The right tool for the job" is too complicated for a lot of people to understand. Tradeoffs? Tradeoffs require understanding.

"XYZ is the best, just use it" is much easier, especially if you don't know how to make decisions and don't really care. Then you defend your non-decision by parroting what you read.

I remember a product manager talking crap about Kafka years ago, and I started digging in as to why he didn't like it, and all of his reasons were marketing FUD from competitors. It was odd, his understanding of it was a Potemkin village.

All tools presumably solve a problem. If you understand that envelope you can figure out if it works for you and your envelope.

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

#272

Post by dd8601fn »

robertlagrant wrote: post #254
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.

> a thousand not-great mobile apps sprang from this idea.

Hi. That’s me… not-great mobile app maker. And yes, I’m grateful that RN exists.

Mostly what it does is make sure that an Android version of things exist at all.

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

#273

Post by Shorel »

user43928 wrote: post #233
Shorel wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I stand corrected. I will leave one star reviews from now on.

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

#274

Post by _fzslm »

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…

This is true in a very real sense – models can help you build native apps very quickly, no question. But how do you keep them from drifting apart from one another as you add/change features or design? Right now, there isn't much tooling for this.

React Native's advantage of having a single source of truth for code hasn't quite gone away yet, imo.

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

#275

Post by manmal »

ftchd wrote: post #130
joenada wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your assumptions are very outdated. App Store review times are typically < 24 hours and have been for the last couple of years. And KMP makes cross-platform a real thing now, rather than hacking a web view into a native shell, which was always the worst possible user experience.

Apple has started automating them a while ago so a lot of them are indeed Just this week I've had an app stay for 9 days in review and another one for 8 hours. Same dev account, same niche.

When it takes longer than 36h, just revoke and submit again. It's probably just stuck in some queue.

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

#276

Post by schrodinger »

joshstrange wrote: post #131
schrodinger wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.runway.team/appreviewtimes

I'm sorry but that data does not at all square with my experience. I'm seeing 2 days+ as the average and I haven't seen sub-24hrs in months. I oversee ~20 apps and I can tell you iOS review times have been trending upwards for the last few months.

Apologies, I used to use appreviewtimes .com [dead], which scraped tweets and was pretty accurate, but is dead now. I posted what seemed to be a decent replacement, but will take your word it’s not.

Edit: was going to update the earlier comment but just hit the 2 hr mark.

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

#278

Post by croes »

user43928 wrote: post #229
croes wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you don’t know the language you can’t evaluate if the models really found bugs.

That’s like translating a text to another language without knowing the language

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

#279

Post by Dfiesl »

_fzslm wrote: post #274
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…

This is true in a very real sense – models can help you build native apps very quickly, no question. But how do you keep them from drifting apart from one another as you add/change features or design? Right now, there isn't much tooling for this. React Native's advantage of having a single source of truth for code hasn't quite gone away yet, imo.

Android and iphone emulator MCP, model compares screens, flags is theres drift? Something like that I’d guess

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

#280

Post by akd »

_fzslm wrote: post #274
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…

This is true in a very real sense – models can help you build native apps very quickly, no question. But how do you keep them from drifting apart from one another as you add/change features or design? Right now, there isn't much tooling for this. React Native's advantage of having a single source of truth for code hasn't quite gone away yet, imo.

"GPT-8 Galaxia - figure out where our iOS and Android apps show different doohickeys and fix them"
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