Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by hn_submit » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 5:43 PM UTC

pkaler wrote: post #43

I'm sitting here at my desk overlooking Cordova Street. The street that Apache Cordova is named after. I've seen this debate for almost two decades now. Teams jump on the latest cross-platform framework assuming that it will reduce headcount cost at the expense of having a lowest-common denominator app on each platform. The latter is true but the former is false. What ends up happening is that teams start as 20 iOS e…

I've dumped all cross-platform frameworks as well. I tried many of them but they just weren't good enough, even for simple stuff. There were always glitches and teething problems that marred the overall quality compared to the native version.

I'm currently maintaining versions for both iOS and Android.

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

#342

Post by tcoff91 » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 5:43 PM UTC

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #240

iBelieve wrote: post #208

It's interesting that they don't mention Kotlin Multiplatform or any sort of shared core logic between their iOS and Android apps. Seems like maybe the apps are fully independent codebases but with shared specifications and tests? They say that agents: > Dramatically reduced the cost of maintaining parity between platforms through shared specifications, tests, and review checkpoints I've used Kotlin Multiplatform on…

Speaking personally, JVM toolchain bits like Gradle being involved is a turnoff and has kept me away from KMP. Last I checked support wasn't really there yet, but I'd much rather go the other direction and use Swift Package Manager and the associated toolchain on Android.

I work on an open source app that uses a shared swift core for the iOS and android apps and I think it's awesome. I think having all your business logic in swift is great.

At work, we use react native, and although the upgrades and stuff are painful, I'd never give up the ability to ship over the air updates.

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

#343

Post by IshKebab » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

simonhamp wrote: post #328

As 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.…

> they're basically going to be spending a ton more than they have to by switching back to multiple apps

A ton more what? Money? AI costs are insignificant to a company like Spotify. Hell I've been using Astra fairly extensively at work and I've only racked up like $500 in the last month. Peanuts.

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

#344

Post by kentm » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

sfn42 wrote: post #142

kelnos wrote: post #81

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. 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…

I don't have any actual experience with React Native and Electron, but with that caveat out of the way I personally think tools get far too much blame that should be on developers. For an example that I actually have experience with, React very frequently gets criticized for being slow, heavy etc. React is not slow. I can make (have made) fast and snappy websites in react. React can render at more than 60fps if neces…

> React can render at more than 60fps if necessary, and if the code isn't shit.

Sorry, that doesn't really come across as a ringing endorsement. React apps are typically not doing anything complex so rendering at less than 60fps should only happen if you're doing very computationally intensive things or writing bottom-quartile quality code.

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

#345

Post by mike_ivanov » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

synergy20 wrote: post #294

wow, what about electron.js the bloated cross-desktop GUI, can LLM either totally modernize wxWidgets(to avoid Qt's license mess), or create some light-weight cross platform GUI widgets to make GUI easy on windows/macos/linux that is not resource heavy?

wxWidgets carries too much legacy. A GTK3 fork maybe? Or a functional clone of QML with some improvements.

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

#346

Post by SV_BubbleTime » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

RetpolineDrama wrote: post #91

lackoftactics wrote: post #7

I believe this will be overall trend in industry. Dropping React Native and Flutter for native

Yep. Flutter has been dead-end for a while. RN won't last through 2027.

LOL, flutter/dart are pretty awesome and we have yet to encounter something that needed improvement.

We have small shims for IOS or Android BLE. But otherwise the discussion of should you go native is really a discussion of how many employees do you have to throw with this?

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

#347

Post by SV_BubbleTime » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

iamgopal wrote: post #44

when you are large enough to allocate sufficient resource, you should go native, if not, go flutter/react native etc. Its very simple decisions I guess.

Which is why the topic about what Shopify does should apply to absolutely almost no one.

Who has more people/resources to justifiably throw at their native app than Shopify? Maybe a dozen companies?

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

#348

Post by tcoff91 » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

uncle_kostya wrote: post #186

An Android developer since 2010 here. I've always been wary of React Native, because my impression is that it hides nuances of the underlying framework. You may be fine implementing 90% of your app but then need that last 10% and may get stuck. But then I'm also wary of the recent trend by Google to create higher level frameworks on top of native Android APIs. It seems that these days for every Android API family, th…

It's incredibly easy nowadays to drop down to native from react native where you need to.

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

#349

Post by SV_BubbleTime » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

m3kw9 wrote: post #253

They are admitting React was a shtty choice for a mobile app if they have a choice.

I think what they’re actually admitting is if they have more resources to throw at native.

This is non-starter math for small companies.

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

#350

Post by cyberax » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

hermitwriter wrote: post #234

faangguyindia wrote: post #35

React 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

It's not. RN has always used native widgets (with a custom renderer) but the JS code itself is purely interpreted.

They increased the interpreter performance by quite a bit, but JITs are impossible on iOS, so it can never be fast.

We have a RN app that needs to do a lot of geometry processing and things like polyclip are unbearably slow, so we had to add native modules to accelerate them. The web version with a true JIT works just fine.