Most of the costs of switching have yet to be borne: user issues with untested code, maintenance issues with code few understand, and the strategic dependency on coding LLM's, which will change in character after providers go public and need revenue to fit reasonable stock multiples. All only get worse with time unless they're addressed proactively.
Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
281–290 of 962 posts
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#282And I'm just sitting here looking at the Codex desktop mac app wondering why a list, a chat window and textbox require a 579 MB download (compressed) and 4 GB of RAM.
An entire copy of libreoffice, for one.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For all I know it is accurate for them but I encourage you to hover on the bars and see the min/max. That's where the issue is. I wrote more about it here [0] but the TL;DR is that it's wildly inconsistent, sometimes it can take a few hours or [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49645559
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#284The article itself comes from AI ? It says twice why they switched from Native to React Native in two distinct paragraphs at the beginning. The rest sounds also AI slop jargon.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#285Bragging about "using agents to code pre-GPT" is quite the corporate flex... weren't they notoriously bad back then? Might as well say, "We've been doing spreadsheets with quantum computing since 2016"
I'm skeptical. Pre-ChatGPT the models didn't understand tool calls or file editing so you couldn't really do targeted edits. So I really am not sure what they mean by this. I mean, it's not impossible - I wrote a "coding agent" with GPT-3. It sucked balls. The idea was you write a Markdown spec file and the tool then compiled it to an equivalent source code one shotting it every time, but it hardly worked at all. The…
The GP misquoted the article. They actually wrote:
> Shopify has been using LLMs to build software since 2021
GitHub Copilot integrated into VS Code started becoming available that year. It’s definitely not a coding agent, but it was certainly LLM-assisted programming.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#286Most large tech companies are just job programmes, i've seen so much effort, time, cost go into things that are truly unimportant.
React Native gives you (with asterisks) - one "source" for things to go wrong (as it sits on top of the native implementations of the UI + Native APIs). You are writing at that source level, and that filters down to the native builds. I am WELL aware to do certain things on each platform you need to get your hands dirty, but most apps are just serialising JSON from a database and displaying it.
AI writes very buggy, sloppy code.
They've decided - instead of containing that code to 1 surface, they would now have 2 surfaces they throw slop on top of.
I look forward to the 2027 version of this where they've gone back
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#287React native isn't a terrible idea, its fundamental issue is that Apple does not allow for JIT compilation on iOS. So that means your app's js logic will be an order of magnitude slower than what you would get in the browser.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#288We did the same thing - had 90% of it overnight. Then spent a few days in the background tweaking for polish. Our app is smaller, and has about 15-20 screens. I started at about 12:30am by giving codex a goal and it inventoried every screen based on the react native code, then created android and iOS directories, used maestro (I had already set up this tooling for a previous personal app build a few weeks prior), and…
And there's no proprietary IP in your company's app that you don't mind being sucked up into the training data?
Frankly there’s more likely to be proprietary IP in the server side code than in mobile apps.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Or https://developer.apple.com/contact/app-store/?topic=expedit... - I've had good results from their expedite tool.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#290It is the "why use python" for mobile.
The native apps will definitely be better in terms of performance and UX. However, having 2 codebases means twice the tokens.