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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

#681

Post by dominus103 »

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…

People who has not run software at scale have no idea what it takes to run it at scale. Google chrome is 60 engineers at launch but google same company has more than 100k engineers. Building first version was always easy and only gotten easy, scaling software was always hard and it is still hard.

PS - Spotify i can't defend the product sucks.

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

#682

Post by rhdunn »

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…

You're comparing a company (Shopify) to an application (Google Chrome). A better comparison would be the number of engineers at Google (90,000 [1]) vs Shopify, or the number of developers actually working on the mobile application instead of any other area (website, backend database, internal systems and processes, infrastructure management and maintenance, etc.).

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rpandey1234_its-mind-bending-...

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

#683

Post by dmazzoni »

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…

When Chrome 1.0 came out in 2008, it only ran on Windows, and it couldn't do basic things like print or export to PDF, didn't have any accessibility, didn't work in RTL languages, and didn't have any graphics acceleration, among other limitations. Don't get me wrong, it was a marvelous piece of engineering - but it was extremely incomplete. By the time it was what we think of as a modern, complete browser, they had many hundreds of engineers working on it.

Also, you're comparing the number of engineers working on one product, to the number of engineers working at Shopify across their entire company today, which includes far more than just one app.

You're entitled to your opinion that Shopify is a poor app or that it's overengineered, but clearly it's not simple. That's just a fact. If it looks like a simple app to you, that's because you're not seeing most of it.

It's like looking at the YouTube mobile app as someone who watches videos and saying that the app frontend looks simple. You're only seeing 5% of the app. The other 95% is for video creators and advertisers, and it is decidedly NOT simple. I think that's the same here.

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

#685

Post by gib444 »

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.

I'd be shocked if a ton of contractors haven't worked for X since then

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

#686

Post by leoedin »

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…

> One of the best political moves in a company is to have a lot of people under you.

This is why I’m sceptical of “AI will kill corporate jobs”. A big company has no profit sharing for successful departments. Everyone is trying to get budget to hire because it makes them feel important.

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

#688

Post by conradfr »

dmazzoni wrote: post #683
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…

When Chrome 1.0 came out in 2008, it only ran on Windows, and it couldn't do basic things like print or export to PDF, didn't have any accessibility, didn't work in RTL languages, and didn't have any graphics acceleration, among other limitations. Don't get me wrong, it was a marvelous piece of engineering - but it was extremely incomplete. By the time it was what we think of as a modern, complete browser, they had m…

And it was a fork.

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

#689

Post by gib444 »

meowtimemania wrote: post #487
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.

Another scary thing is with AI it's easy to let complexity get out of hand to the point where a human manually writing code is basically impossible. Even though AI might seem capable of handling the complexity, you'll start noticing all these weird bugs pop up all over your codebase.

I'd say that was even a goal of the AI companies. It's not in their interest to generate human-maintainable code

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

#690

Post by sgt »

fergie wrote: post #687

In the age of LLMs, I get why you would dump portablity in favour of close-to-the-metal Swift and Javascript codebases. However I don't really understand the need for Kotlin- surely thats just an unnecessary complication and performance hit?

That's for the Android version, I would assume
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