Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

shopify.engineering

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 962 posts

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

#621

Post by stingraycharles »

knocte wrote: post #614
Vegenoid wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

I don’t think that AI would have made this confusion (it’s much less likely to overlook things like these), and I’m also not of the opinion that these comments confuse the two companies, it’s rather than Spotify is used by the grandparent as another example like Shopify.

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

#623

Post by m10ax »

Vegenoid wrote: post #610
sashank_1509 wrote: post #599

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…

The mythical man-month ;)

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

#624

Post by beached_whale »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #599

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…

I wonder how many of those are there to consult with customers and help them build their stores.

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

#625

Post by sidcool »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #599

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…

Comments like these make me wonder if people don't understand the difference between engineering and business.

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

#626

Post by simonhamp »

nfw2 wrote: post #269
paxys wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the “makes sense or not” part can change based on a bunch of factors. It’s actually pretty common for a new company to start fully native (only iOS, few features, limited scope), then switch ro react native/electron (need to support more surfaces, features are being developed too quickly), then back to fully native (can afford individual dev teams for each platform).

The main cost of two engineering teams shipping identical products in my opinion isn't the cost of those extra engineers, it is in the product and organizational challenges of keeping those two products that need to be identical in sync. I am very bullish on coding agents but would be wary of this turning into a mess.

Agree to a point, but human resource is literally the main cost in most businesses, so there's that

Conway's law also plays a big part here and it's kind of TBD to see if agentic development will minify or magnify its effects

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

#627

Post by knocte »

stingraycharles wrote: post #621
knocte wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don’t think that AI would have made this confusion (it’s much less likely to overlook things like these), and I’m also not of the opinion that these comments confuse the two companies, it’s rather than Spotify is used by the grandparent as another example like Shopify.

Actually, the first occurrence might have just been a typo (auto-correct?), but the second occurrence looks like slop directed at the previous comment.

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

#629

Post by aetch »

vantassell wrote: post #612
Vegenoid wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Probably both

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

#630

Post by InterviewFrog »

sidcool wrote: post #625
sashank_1509 wrote: post #599

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…

Comments like these make me wonder if people don't understand the difference between engineering and business.

That’s what they said about Elon firing 80% of Twitter’s staff. But X is doing pretty well.
Post reply on HN