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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

#591

Post by asdfsa32 »

sprite wrote: post #453
asdfsa32 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was surprised by your comments and then you do Rust to be called via Java or Kotlin and Swift? What does your app do?

Yes uniffi created swift and kotlin bindings. The app I did with this is just a sudoku game https://www.puzzlesight.com . Before AI I would have reached for something like Flutter to avoid doing all work twice but with AI doing two apps makes more sense.

Okay, makes sense, the whole thing looks and screams vibe coded. On a beefy machine, navigating between your website pages takes 2-3 seconds. So still a long way to go with AI.

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

#592

Post by simonhamp »

IshKebab wrote: post #402
simonhamp wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More code means more people. That's not peanuts

The whole point of this article is that it doesn't. Or at least for the same number of people you can now have way more code.

Is more code the right goal?

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

#594

Post by simonhamp »

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?

Working on this problem for the next version of NativePHP Desktop. Have dropped Electron entirely

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

#595

Post by alex_sf »

elvis10ten wrote: post #305
user43928 wrote: post #95

Earlier 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…

> 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 was a 10 liner PR that catches this exception and ignores it.

I understand this, but I just can't bring myself to care. I've been doing professional software work for almost two decades. These sorts of improvements/time savers are great without AI. With AI? Whatever. It's fine.

When the underlying lib has an issue, it'll be quicker to debug with the whole thing in context.

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

#596

Post by simonhamp »

starlineventure wrote: post #18

Native. Metal. Remove the abatraction layers

We're only where we are in the world of computing because of abstraction layers

It's not the layers that are the problem; they're the point.

It's the quality of those layers. React is just a poor abstraction layer

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

#597

Post by sombragris »

I'm an user; I have zero or near zero development and programming knowledge, so this take of mine might be complete nonsense.

But I think this is perhaps one of the first AI developments I actually like. Transitioning an app from React Native or any web technology to native code has the distinct advantage that the native version should be much more economical in its use of resources.

I'm tired of hearing about RAM and other components hiking their prices while at the same time RAM sizes of ~8 GB are considered too small because things like Electron apps are wasteful in their consumption of resources. Now, with more native apps, we might get full circle: leaner apps thanks to agentic development. Maybe someday 8 GB of RAM could be considered enough once again. Truly interesting.

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

#599

Post by sashank_1509 »

Numbers from GPT Astra - Shopify has 3000 engineers as of 2026

- Google Chrome when released in 2008 conservatively had ~ 60 engineers.

- GTA 5 in its credits had 150 software engineers. Surprising even to me who has had many an experience of being in a bloated FAANG team, this 150 includes GTA Online!

In a sane society, Shopify’s opinion on anything engineering related would be thrown into rubbish because they seem to have managed to complicate a simple app into requiring thousands of engineers and now maybe millions in cloud spending to Frontier labs. This is unfortunately not an isolated case, Spotify for one has the same issue, idk what “engineering” Spotify is doing, it’s the worst app I’ve used in my life.

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

#600

Post by gooseyman »

hectdev wrote: post #517
ronsor wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're right when it makes business sense, which is also about cost and why Shopify didn't do it before.

I'm not arguing the business sense. Two sides can be right which is why I advocated for native development. Which is vindicated here.

If you weren't arguing against the business case, what were you arguing with the C-level types about? I don't think I have ever heard a case for react that wasn't centered around shared codebases mean fewer resources/cost/time to deliver a feature.
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