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Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

shopify.engineering

611–620 of 962 posts

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

#611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think updating js without review is also against policy.

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

#612

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…

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 peopl…

>Spotify has progressively gotten much worse over the last 15 years, all while the size of their engineering team has ballooned.

Spotify or Shopify?

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

#613

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…

What are we talking about here - Spotify or Shopify ?

If Shopify - and you are concerned about their engineering teams, please consider that Shopify's revenue grew from roughly $205 million in 2015 to $11.56 billion in 2025, reflecting an explosive compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 45% across the past decade. Market validates !

I have nothing to add about Spotify - I use it to listen to music and it works well for me !

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

#614

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…

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 peopl…

[flagged]

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

#615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I take the specifications from the customer and type them into the AI

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

#616
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…

Next up, designing an even higher level language which will be used by LLMs to compile to high level languages like kotlin or swift. Just store instructions for LLMs in repos.

I hate to break it to you, but we already have it: it's called PHP

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

#617

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…

> 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!

Just so it is said: my understanding is it's really easy to not end up on the credits list for games despite having worked on it. I don't know if contractors end up on there for example, at least beyond some team leads or the like. I don't know R*'s policies though, I've heard stories of people not being in credits because they, for example, changed jobs near the end of the development.

I get your overall point though

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

#618

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…

In the corporate software world, especially anything to do with the web both front and back, most people really don’t know what they are doing. The goal is hiring/firing and agile.

Compare that to companies that release actual software products. The goal is product release at high enough quality. There are real performance and security targets to achieve.

Your typical corporate developer, on the other hand, does not have release targets. The actual goal is compatibility with the industry least common denominator expectations and retaining employment. This is why so many people are needed to do the work and why the result is so slow and bloated.

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

#619

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…

its actually not that weird if you consider that those shopify engineers are probably not even exceeding 150,000 usd on average salary wise

canadian dollar is very cheap so you'd likely see 40~50% more headcounts for the same burn rates you get in USA

i definitely dont think those shopify engineers are going to be retained long term however

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

#620

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 an…

100% with you. I'm fed up of having my M3 36GB run out of memory because I have Chrome, Slack, Discord and Claude all open at the same time

That's why I'm building SuperNative

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