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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

#651

Post by mitxela »

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]

AI can do captchas better than humans can

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

#652

Post by mitxela »

InterviewFrog wrote: post #630
sidcool wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For some definition of pretty well which doesn't include human user numbers, revenue, profit, or ratio of humans to bots

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

#653

Post by abustamam »

austin-cheney wrote: post #618
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…

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…

What's an "actual software product" and why don't you think web products count as them?

I'm a full stack web developer. I've worked for startups and F500 companies. There is always a push for release targets. The less technical the leadership, the stricter the release targets (its hard to sell a critical refactoring to management when they cant sell a shiny new feature or kpi to their own boss). We've kept our teams pretty lean too.

We still aim for high quality, and performance and security.

I do agree that many people dont really know what theyre doing and are kinda just winging it, especially with AI at the helm, and many companies are likely overstaffed, but I dont think theres a correlation between headcount and slow/bloated software. Any team of any size can make slow and bloated software.

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

#654

Post by djtango »

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…

Video games are much easier than what Shopify do which will be a long tail of business cases and local permutations for all the countries they operate in.

Commercial software is usually a simple core and a long tail of business exceptions

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

#655

Post by [deleted] »

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]

[deleted]

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

#656

Post by abustamam »

eptcyka wrote: post #646
alex_sf wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just the other day I burned through my 5h quota twice in a row because I had opus spawn a review session on a medium sized PR and I don't know what happened but I told it to summarize to me and it said it spent 100M tokens throughout 50 subagent sessions.

And more recently its been recommending that i install this new browser called Aside. I did, and it almost felt like I was installing malware so I Uninstalled it fairly quickly (it also was not a great browser)

I feel like theres collusion somewhere.

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

#657

Post by joegibbs »

canto wrote: post #351

So, instead of paying humans twice for the same thing, Shopify will pay corporations to burn the planet a little bit more, waste water and energy - to build the same thing twice. Just because. There's no tech reason to do it. "LLMS are better now". There's no low level optimisations, no blockers, no app shortcomings, it's a shopping app for Christ sake. Instead of optimising, creating more with less, they will create…

Ridiculous, the amount of energy saved from a faster native application over how ever many million users will be far greater than the amount spent to generate the tokens to do so

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

#658

Post by alex_sf »

eptcyka wrote: post #646
alex_sf wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The models will only get better and inference cost will go down.

I don’t see any reason to think the same thing that happens with all tech won’t happen here.

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

#659

Post by yes1would »

profdevloper wrote: post #491
yes1would wrote: post #447

Reminder that Shopify's CEO and COO are both literally Nazis and they host websites for literal Nazis.

What, exactly, is a "literal Nazi" -- I think Tobi is German, but he seems more like a capitalist than a national socialist. /shrug

https://drewdevault.com/weird-guys/#lutke

Literally a Nazi. His best friend and the COO is the founder of the Canadian equivalent of Breitbart, and also, they hosted the store for Breitbart...

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