Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

Post by hn993302 » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 3:10 AM UTC

hectdev wrote: post #547

npunt wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument was you've argued your whole career for native. The article argues only very recently the cost equation has changed. Your argument reads like you are not taking into account the broader context or the passage of time.

I'll put it this way, my argument was pro native. And in the context of the article, if a large company had unlimited resources, they would choose native. I'm not discussing the business case for it, but the end result of it being the better option. It can be seen as "Shopify tried Reactive Native and left it behind the second they could after sinking resources into it for 6 years".

Post by hn993302 » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 3:12 AM UTC

Post by simonhamp » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 3:13 AM UTC

uselesswords wrote: post #562

canto wrote: post #351

So, instead of paying humans twice for the same thing, Shopify will pay corporations to burn the planet a little bit more, waste water and energy - to build the same thing twice. Just because. There's no tech reason to do it. "LLMS are better now". There's no low level optimisations, no blockers, no app shortcomings, it's a shopping app for Christ sake. Instead of optimising, creating more with less, they will create…

Can someone explain the waste water thing to me, because unless they’re separating it into H2 and O2 how is it possible for water to be wasted?

Post by simonhamp » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 3:14 AM UTC

mkhalil wrote: post #398

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 ]

Post by simonhamp » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 3:19 AM UTC

azkalam wrote: post #361

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 can see the case for shared core libraries and then platform native views. This is best done in one programming language. Can Swift, Rust or .NET work here?