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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

#391

Post by skydhash »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #217
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.

The thing that makes Microsoft's case particularly annoying is that they have demonstrated how they can develop half-decent Electron apps with VS Code, but have simply elected not to with anything that's not VS Code. Like yes, I'd prefer native and MS can certainly afford to take that path, but they can't even be bothered to make sure that most of their Electron apps land on the upper half of the quality spectrum.

> they can develop half-decent Electron apps with VS Code,

Only if you don't compare it with any native or quasi native editors like Notepad++ or Sublime text. And Emacs has been cross-platform for decades.

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

#392

Post by synergy20 »

mike_ivanov wrote: post #345
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.

maybe gtk4 gui first then ask llm to recreate them natively on windows and macos

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

#393

Post by atonse »

arkits wrote: post #134
masom wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You just install it on your phone and use the app. OP says they don't have an android phone...

Android studio has a emulator

I used the emulator - but just like I can use an iOS app for 30 seconds and tell you whether it feels native or not, I can't do the same for Android, since I'm not a daily user of Android phones.

And in the past, I didn't care because when I was manually building the app, I would just do my best with react native. But now that I can actually sweat the details (with the help of agents), I do want to hear from android users and use as many OS-native APIs and features.

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

#394

Post by atonse »

user43928 wrote: post #137
masom wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You just install it on your phone and use the app. OP says they don't have an android phone...

I missed that. I'd order a cheap Android phone to have a device in hand instead of working only with the simulator.

Others on our team use Android phones. So when I said that we spent the next few days actually polishing it, that's where others came in, providing feedback when they used it.

I could only sweat the details on liquid glass, etc because I'm a daily iOS user.

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

#395

Post by shevy-java »

That also means that ruby becomes less important in their (rails) stack since they move to Swift and Kotlin specifically. Quite interesting considering problem-man DHH ("why are people upset at me shooting at wolves and comparing this it to Roma and Sinti" - and even aside from the connection on his blog to humans, I don't think everyone agrees at gunning down wolves in the first place) is part of the Shopify bromance team.

In hindsight that also explains why they laid off so many ruby devs in the last two years. Now if only someone could have told the ruby core team that companies pursue their own interests ... perhaps then they would not have led to the fiasco about a year or so ago. (And prior to that, the silly 100k downloads restriction at rubygems, aka "after that point we no longer allow you to remove your own code", whereas Microsoft github has no such restrictions in place. What are these people smoking?)

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

#396

Post by atonse »

asdfsa32 wrote: post #143
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…

Codex with what model?

I think probably GPT 5.5, or 5.6 Sol - it was ~ 2 months ago.

Each time I get access to a new model, I do two things on all our active codebases:

- Security review of all the code and vulnerabilities (new models will find new stuff)

- Code review of test suite quality, and idiomatic patterns/code for the language of that codebase.

And in the case of swift and kotlin, it's even more important that an agent helps me with the code quality since I don't know what "idiomatic" swift or kotlin looks like, the way I do with JS, Elixir, C#, Ruby, etc.

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

#397

Post by skydhash »

asdfman123 wrote: post #242
user43928 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That decision is easy: do users leave bad reviews for bundling a few hundred MB of Chromium? Do they leave bad reviews if your app malfunctions due to the system webview behaving differently than the Chromium version you tested with? Forget about saving websites as apps, no one does that. Not sure if it works on Desktop Safari, it certainly doesn't on iOS Safari. Not even persistent storage is offered for PWAs. Apple…

Much of Hacker News seems to be incapable of understanding the average user doesn't care about memory use at all, beyond a few extreme examples. You don't need to argue with me about it: I'm not the average user. But they really do not care at all in most cases.

> Much of Hacker News seems to be incapable of understanding the average user doesn't care about memory use at all, beyond a few extreme examples.

They don't care, but they care about their computer being slow because of swapping. While they can't identify the cause and link it to the various Electron apps they're using (Teams, Slack,...) it's obvious for the tech-aware person they complain to.

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

#398

Post by mkhalil »

A multi-billon dollar company dropping quarters (performance/ux) to pick up pennies (development savings from not maintaining a native app) never made mathematical sense to me.

[ aside: Meta founded the development of RN and they don't even strictly use it; plus, any troubles/hacks they need, they can make to the Framework itself ]

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

#399

Post by kypro »

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…

> The main appeal of RN was being able to leverage your web devs for mobile dev.

> But now that all code is generated, there's little upside to having an RN app... just start native. Your devs are barely going to be writing code anyway.

Are you saying:

- webdevs are now able to write and review native code because of AI (who cares if they don't really understand it); or,

- Because developers are more productive we can cut the number of webdevs and hire native engineers – same no. engineers, same output, but now native apps.

Why not:

Continue using RN but now and just enjoy being more productive? If productivity was the reason to pick RN, then enjoy it. It's not a bug.

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