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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

#641

Post by moomoo11 »

golly_ned wrote: post #632
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…

This is wrongheaded in so many ways. To start -- how many of those 3,000 engineers do you think work on the mobile app? And even among those who work on the app -- do you think they're all working on user quality-of-life and just can't get it right? And it's a $175BB company -- do you think it's worth that much based on the quality of its mobile app?

i will bet 175 billion dollars people like that guy are bikeshedding types

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

#642

Post by cschep »

user43928 wrote: post #192
asdfsa32 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am using Gemini as well as Opus on a somewhat small project in React Native and I can not imagine this thing being able to build the whole thing on its own without it being a dumbpster fire. Can you share some details of how you work? What models? What harness?

I use Codex and Claude Code desktop apps. I generally use only the SOTA, now Astra and Fable 5.1, Opus 5 when Fable runs out. I don't know if Gemini is suitable. I had few issues with my native iOS app, the results are just decent after a few iterations, the models do what I ask them to do. Where do you see the problem? The LOC for my app is now at almost 200k + 110k lines of test code.

[flagged]

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

#643

Post by moomoo11 »

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.

most people don’t. that’s why they are employees.

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

#644

Post by amedvednikov »

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?

https://github.com/vlang/ui2 does just that

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

#645

Post by seabrookmx »

ICHx wrote: post #445

While Meta's Whatsapp just dropped native Windows client for Electron Lack of vision?

Lack of a sane desktop app framework from Microsoft.

Heck Microsoft wrote their own damn start menu in React native, and VS Code in Electron.

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

#646

Post by eptcyka »

alex_sf wrote: post #615
SoftTalker wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So exactly what value are you adding, then?

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

You do realize that letting the LLM produce more output means that maintenance will be more expensive? I can easily see a world where claude and gpt are producing more tokens to sell you more tokens.

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

#647

Post by abustamam »

pavelstoev wrote: post #613
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…

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 we…

Shopify works well for me but it used to push nonsense like podcasts or audio books that I had no interest in, with no way for me to hide them. I just want to listen to music.

Upon looking just now, seems like they have been relegated to their own tabs now, which is great.

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

#648

Post by lmf4lol »

hollowturtle wrote: post #442
lmf4lol wrote: post #370

Yesterday, just before bedtime, I pointed Astra at our Electron Desktop app, and asked it to write me a native Swift app for iOS. The electron app has 750 unit tests and 50 something integration tests. It also had access to the electron app via mcp and could click around and inspect it. I also gave Astra read only access to the backend code. It worked for 3 hours and delivered a nearly feature complete port. Today, I…

psychosis

what? why? Do you say I made this up?

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

#649

Post by rrr_oh_man »

enraged_camel wrote: post #191
eleventen wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it would. Supply and demand. Some companies would decide not to bother. Others would decide it was worthwhile. The limited pool of supply (app developers) would be distributed across demand.

>> Some companies would decide not to bother. Others would decide it was worthwhile. The parent's point is that AI lowers the cost/benefit ratio drastically, by reducing the cost. So companies that would have shied away from projects like this pre-AI are now pulling the trigger without much hesitation.

> The parent's point is that AI lowers the cost/benefit ratio drastically, by reducing the cost.

…as long as Claude is still subsidized…

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

#650

Post by mitxela »

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…

They'll be mostly involved with the parts that make money. I worked in a similar situation as one of about 5 people keeping the core infrastructure of the product working, meanwhile about 500 people optimized the ads
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