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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

#371

Post by robertoandred »

jwlake wrote: post #246
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…

A badly made native app is worse than a well built react-native app. There are plenty of anti-patterns that will ruin your native app. In stories like this its much more likely that they just got sick of refactoring a big ugly code base so got buy in to throw it all away and starting over and the justification is native. Wait like 5 years and there will be a new react-native corss platform app because the native apps…

I think they also got sick of supporting those open source libraries.

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

#372

Post by trencedamp »

In my limited experience, in h2 this year, LLMs were kind of shit at building Mobile apps. I had to switch TO react native because the flutter app it built me was a horrible buggy mess and I couldn't debug it myself because I don't speak dart. At least with react native I can kind of get in the weeds if needed

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

#373

Post by bluGill »

edoceo wrote: post #292
bluGill wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those are the comments that should persist in the code. I hate when the AI edits and removes my "why" comments. I want the refactor to make it less messy but keep why it's that kind of mess.

Too Soon often we thought those were obvious and didn't comment. Meanwhile there are detailed comments about things nobody cares about.

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

#374

Post by xp84 »

bluGill wrote: post #259
rafaelmn wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As relevant today as it was 26 years ago: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

See also: Chesterton's Fence

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

#375

Post by ceejayoz »

joenada wrote: post #136
joshstrange wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid you are the one out of date here. App Store Review times have ballooned in the last few months. Marco Arment talked about this publically (on the ATP podcast) about how his app was stuck in review for over 2 weeks IIRC and I've seen 2 days as the minimum review time in the last few months with some taking a week or more. Yes, for a while they were doing very well and I even once had an app reviewed in <1hr…

This is only anecdotal, but I had a review on a brand new app turned around in ~6 hours 2 days ago. A lot of it has always been luck of the draw, though, granted.

It's also dependent on when you file. My reviews seem to come back around 2-3 AM Eastern; I presume they're overseas contractors.

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

#376

Post by xp84 »

joefourier wrote: post #357
pessimizer wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always the preference of people defending bad decisions to compare them to doing nothing. What you're seeing is people actually making that case instead of forcing it. They're saying that if the app wouldn't exist without this bad thing, then it is appropriate to compare using the bad thing to doing nothing. You just seem to be demanding that people not mention other ways to do things, or you'll get angry.

The app not existing would unironically be better in so many instances, though. The web version doesn’t take up 1GB of disk space, install persistent services, send you push notifications by default, and it’s trivial to block ads in comparison. I’d be very happy if companies didn’t artificially degrade their web version to force installation of an “app” that’s effectively a web browser in disguise.

Hard agree. Day by day, I become more exhausted with "apps" as they are currently delivered, with native being slightly better than cross-plaform, but not good.

Apps in 2026 deliver all the disadvantages of a plain ol' website (Requires an always-on WAN to have any function whatsoever, UI that doesn't meld with the OS in any way, no integration with things like Shortcuts...) but add huge real costs: Extra time before I can start using it, the hogging of easily 500-1000MB of disk space on day 1, a growing un-clearable cache, sluggish transitions with useless animations, and the need to be "updated" on a regular basis (whether used or not) wasting my time and bandwidth.

One of the few benefits to me as the user of a 'client application' has always been that a well-made app uses an API to speak to the server which is dramatically lower bandwidth than the modern BloatWeb with AdTech™ stack could ever match, which ought to enable the highest performance. But it seems like they rarely actually deliver that benefit.

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

#377

Post by xp84 »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #144
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's objectively bad because of how hot my phone is. It's subjectively bad because it's an embarrassment. Like you're seriously going to tell me something like Discord, worth 15 BILLION, cannot afford native apps? Spare me.

What really grinds my gears is Microsoft replacing native apps with Electron. Trillion dollar company who is so cash strapped they have no choice but to punt to the easy development path.

Yikes. What apps have they been doing this with?

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

#378

Post by lnrd »

greenowl wrote: post #36
atonse wrote: post #31

We 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 people say AI isn't taking SWE jobs...

This app has 15/20 screens, an app this small wouldn't employ many people to begin with. Before there was one guy (op) maintaining it in react native and now he maintains it native. I don't see much change tbh.

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

#379

Post by xp84 »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #156
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What really grinds my gears is Microsoft replacing native apps with Electron. Trillion dollar company who is so cash strapped they have no choice but to punt to the easy development path.

What's extra egregious there is I do understand the logic because developing for Windows is such a fucking nightmare, that they're also responsible for.

I assure you, developing for competing platforms is also a fucking nightmare... that's something Microsoft has no monopoly on!

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

#380

Post by simonhamp »

IshKebab wrote: post #343
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.

More code means more people. That's not peanuts
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