Why on earth is Shopify not just a web wrapped in an app like most apps? I mean, they implement most of that stuff for the desktop anyway.
Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
321–330 of 962 posts
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would attribute that more to culture. For example https://diffs.com/ is built in React and it's basically instant.
I would attribute it to physics. If the entire page is rendered on the server, the information required to do so is presumably reasonably approximate (same datacenter). If most of the page is rendered on the client, the information needs to be pulled in from arbitrary physical distances. At some point the engineering really is this simple.
Which is also, or at least has also been a culture thing, because of the
"Oh no, we can't possibly do the computation of all that on our backend! Yikes! Let that run on every single client instead! Let users spend their own compute over and over."
culture.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#323Earlier 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 work as a professional app developer. And I find this take to be naive. Most of the time when I review code from AI, there is always something to improve. It’s either a maintenance issue. e.g., Opus recommended and implemented a fix for a database corruption crash. This was ~400 lines of code with many moving parts. I reviewed, and found out Android Room library already handles this recovery case, and all I needed…
So you don't use agentic AI to develop a large mobile app and you think my take is naive?
I also used to work full time as a Android developer for five years, and I'm pretty sure I know better than you about the quality of my app that I work on everyday.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#324[dead]
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#325If 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. 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…
> For a while it seemed that having deeply held, nuance-free opinions about technologies was a sign of being wise and experienced
this was every DBA in the late 90's and early 2000s when talking about their pet RDBMS. To me, it was a signal to avoid that person unless absolutely necessary.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#326React 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
mind sharing a link or two on the native code generation bit? I'm far behind from the scene but still curious.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#327Models 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…
Nobody is talking about the real advantage of RN: Being able to release to the App Store without having to go through a review. That's so massive. Getting a bug fix out to users instantly, sneaking in optimizations, etc..
Sure, you need a review to release native code changes, and you should probably get a review if you have big feature changes just for the sake of Apple not banning you. But in practice, it removes one of the biggest annoyances of developing for the App Store.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#328As the builder of a post-AI, cross-platform native app building framework like React Native, I 100% believe this to be a backwards move.
I've written up a load of thoughts about that here[1], but in summary for the Shopify case, they're basically going to be spending a ton more than they have to by switching back to multiple apps and I'd predict another swing back to better cross-platform tooling in the coming years.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#329Why on earth is Shopify not just a web wrapped in an app like most apps? I mean, they implement most of that stuff for the desktop anyway.
There's quite a bit of research out there showing that application performance has a material impact on checkout conversion rate, so a single platform optimization potentially improves checkout for millions(?) of storefronts.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a type of project that likely wouldn't have been done before AI
Of course it would. Supply and demand. Some companies would decide not to bother. Others would decide it was worthwhile. The limited pool of supply (app developers) would be distributed across demand.
> Some companies would decide not to bother
Sounds like you agree