And so the mobile app development wheel turns. All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.
Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
601–610 of 963 posts
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#602Agreed, the whole of the Javascript / TypeScript ecosystem has caused a slop hellscape of workarounds, half-backed fixes and have exposed short-comings in the ecosystem. Perhaps these languages do not work well as they are not designed to run efficiently on mobile devices. Now that we have libraries such as SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose, React Native no longer makes sense to use. Now we should also move away from Elect…
So disagree. The benefits you get from leveraging a framework as as important today as they have ever been -- strong frameworks, fewer tokens, faster progress.
Hallelujah!
One other person in this place gets it: "fewer tokens, faster progress"
Electron, Tauri, React Native/Expo, Flutter (and countless others) are the wrong kind of abstractions, built for a time pre-AI, solving pre-AI problems
We need a new post-AI abstraction that embraces this opportunity!
That's why we're building SuperNative
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#603Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can download Javascript (or other interpreted language, or config data), but you generally can't download and execute new compiled native code on iOS, due to iOS code-signing/executable-memory restrictions. Also keep in mind Apple might penalize you for dodging the review process and shipping new features, etc. (btw, one exception to the JIT rule is custom browsers for the EU)
Pardon my ignorance but can't an iOS app host a WASM runtime without being a browser? And if so it doesn't need to be an interpreted language necessarily.
I am fairly certain this is against Apple's policies. In principle you're not supposed to change the functionality of your app without review.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#604[dead]
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#605Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 softwa…
So exactly what value are you adding, then?
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#606As an iOS Engineer that has been fighting the battle against every C-level type who brings up the subject of a shared codebase my whole career, I feel very validated.
what they should've done is written logic etc.. in rust and use mobile app just for native layers, so they can still share code.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#607Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the part covered by the other model's review. That together with manually verifying the functionality results in output that works.
If you don’t know the language you can’t evaluate if the models really found bugs. That’s like translating a text to another language without knowing the language
This is wildly overblown. I've been working with agents for a good while, read tens of thousands of generated Python and the language factor is actually the part they get right that humans don't.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#608Why on earth is Shopify not just a web wrapped in an app like most apps? I mean, they implement most of that stuff for the desktop anyway.
Seems like you've never had to worry about accessibility in hybrid apps...
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pardon my ignorance but can't an iOS app host a WASM runtime without being a browser? And if so it doesn't need to be an interpreted language necessarily.
I am fairly certain this is against Apple's policies. In principle you're not supposed to change the functionality of your app without review.
i don't see any difference between wasm and js? If react native apps can be updated with js, wasm should be allowed.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#610Numbers 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…
Spotify has progressively gotten much worse over the last 15 years, all while the size of their engineering team has ballooned.
I am very unsurprised by this outcome.
People wonder why good software becomes bad, and it’s because the people who were good at engineering are often outmaneuvered by corporate-politics savvy people in a growing company. One of the best political moves in a company is to have a lot of people under you.
A couple years ago, an engineer I know who has always been a very poor performer and lacks initiative, but is friendly and non-confrontational, was hired by GitHub. It would not have been hard for GitHub to find a much better engineer, but this person would be an easy person to keep under a manager on a team who wouldn’t leave or make waves. That can be more important to some managers than skills.