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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

#671

Post by teleforce »

doc_ick wrote: post #133
larodi wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React native is an obstacle compared to what clear Swift/Kotlin code may produce. Swift is very powerful and Kotlin, in all honesty, is the first reasonable and very useful thing to come to the JRE ecosystem (save for Scala, which is, well, quite complex still). Myself turned some python code to Swift, and keep doing so, without trouble or pressure. Of course, I've been doing fair amount of systems programming for 20…

Sounds like the advice to newcomers is to not worry about trying to learn a programming language. There already is an llm to program for you, and do it better than you could, so just learn how to talk.

Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it - Perlis.

[1] Epigrams in Programming:

https://engineering.yale.edu/academic-study/departments/comp...

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

#672

Post by mitxela »

hn993302 wrote: post #669
mitxela wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The site is currently running, yes. Don't forget it went down quite often immediately following the mass firing though. They seem to have fixed that.

There was certainly a ton of bloat to trim, but the haphazard "just pick 80% of the people and fire them" was incredibly stupid. Should have chosen whoever was producing the bloat, at least.

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

#673

Post by Jean-Papoulos »

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…

We have no idea how many of these engineers work on the mobile app. This comment is somehow both AI slop and human slop.

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

#674

Post by cwackerfuss »

abustamam wrote: post #647
pavelstoev wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can’t tell if we’re trolling at this point with the mixing up of Shopify and Spotify

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

#675

Post by player1234 »

atonse wrote: post #425
dakolli wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn, we really gotta get rid of the vibe coders. Bad things are on the horizon if we keep encouraging these naive habits.

How do you propose getting "rid" of "Vibe coders" (which I'm assuming you're pooling me into?)

[dead]

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

#677

Post by player1234 »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #649
enraged_camel wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

[dead]

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

#678

Post by msephton »

hn993302 wrote: post #670
simonhamp wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you even escape dependency hell this way?

It's a developer decision. But I'd say it's easier to not use dependencies on native because there are more capable system API. I don't use any in my iOS apps, and only one dependency in 20 macOS apps.

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

#680

Post by akmarinov »

hn993302 wrote: post #670
simonhamp wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you even escape dependency hell this way?

Yeah, with iOS for example, you typically need very little third party dependencies for functionality. The main ones are things like analytics, crash reports, etc

I’m not aware of any attacks on native package managers in the past 5 years. The closest would be a poisoned Xcode build in China that wasn’t downloaded from Apple a while back.

Also getting an attack on one of the platforms means at least ~half your users are safe on the other one.

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