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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

#661

Post by deaux »

mitxela wrote: post #650
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

How is life at Google nowadays?

Oh you said 500, not 5000, my bad.

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

#662

Post by gbalduzzi »

simonhamp wrote: post #580
hectdev wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why someone would say it was a wrong decision. Why would they even need to do this if LLMs make coding easier. They are likely chasing the things I advocate for: direct access to latest APIs from each platform, platform specific UI, UI that behaves correctly on each platform without chasing down edge case solutions (also said as ui that looks and feels "right"), and a bonus of separate developer pool to hire…

Why would they need to worry about hiring for specific skills at all? As AI progresses, isn't the only skill that matters that you can drive it effectively (which encompasses testing and review) without needing oversight?

Because we are not there yet and you can't oversee something you don't know

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

#664

Post by ojbyrne »

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…

One word: Ottawa. There's a lot of engineers, most of them underemployed.

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

#667

Post by jbs789 »

ernsheong wrote: post #479

It seems like Shopify has fallen into a trap thinking that more complexity costs nothing because of AI. In the age of AI we have to embrace the same principle as before that complexity needs to be tamed, not multiplied. Even as humans struggled with complexity, from what I see now AI struggles very much the same. Hence I don't think this will age well.

We should understand the complexity we are adding but having LLMs as a tool does also make managing the complexity easier.

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

#668

Post by akmarinov »

simonhamp wrote: post #665
akmarinov wrote: post #663

Not mentioned but this also gets them away from what now seems monthly npm supply chain attacks. Big win for security

You don't have to ditch cross-platform building entirely just to escape dependency hell

No, but it’s a nice bonus

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

#669

Post by hn993302 »

mitxela wrote: post #652
InterviewFrog wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Pretty well from an engineering perspective. But they've lost so many advertisers because it's intentionally not very moderated.

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

#670

Post by hn993302 »

simonhamp wrote: post #665
akmarinov wrote: post #663

Not mentioned but this also gets them away from what now seems monthly npm supply chain attacks. Big win for security

You don't have to ditch cross-platform building entirely just to escape dependency hell

Do you even escape dependency hell this way?
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