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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

#691

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

cheema33 wrote: post #74
augment_me wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an incredibly boring task. Nothing new, just rewrite everything to just see it all rewritten again in 1 year. Perfect for LLMs and something humans shouldn't do.

> This is an incredibly boring task. We all want super exciting jobs. But plenty have boring jobs like this. Between not having a job or having a boring job that pays well, the choice is obvious for many of us.

Are you defending doing boring work?

I personally never minded doing migrations. I guess I don't really have to anymore though. Weird.

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

#692

Post by z3t4 »

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…

Any book recommendations, that is not satire, about navigating the political landscape?

Spotify had a good app when it came out, p2p and UDP custom networking...

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

#693

Post by wiseowise »

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…

Rubbish. Most of the stuff you’re listing is handled by OS and frameworks themselves, you don’t need hundreds of SE to handle RTL or a11y. I work in one of those companies, most people just regurgitate existing shit into another form of shit and collect salary (not complaining, as I’m one of them, but let’s be honest).

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

#694

Post by Matumio »

freeplay wrote: post #364
chis wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there cybersecurity concerns in the frontend? I would have thought you have to assume the client is untrusted and only do security work on the backend

Nailed it. Assume your client is compromised and/or malicious regardless of how it was built.

If your clients are compromised then what's even the point of backend security. Users will login and do legitimate actions while their compromised client does whatever behind their back, while still looking normal. And the backend can't tell the difference.

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

#695

Post by fergie »

sgt wrote: post #690
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

Right- but why not let the LLM program directly in Java?

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

#696

Post by MrDresden »

azuanrb wrote: post #383
spiderice wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is talking about the real advantage of RN: Being able to release to the App Store without having to go through a review. That's so massive. Getting a bug fix out to users instantly, sneaking in optimizations, etc.. Sure, you need a review to release native code changes, and you should probably get a review if you have big feature changes just for the sake of Apple not banning you. But in practice, it removes o…

I’ve worked with both native and cross-platform. I think the mentality of being able to make changes quickly without much review often comes from cross-platform, especially when the developers come from a web background. Changes are cheap and fast, so teams often feel less pressure to test everything thoroughly before a release. Which is a fair tradeoff. That’s part of the reason we can have dozens of releases a day…

> "Native devs are the old-school ones. Shipping is expensive, so you better get it as right as possible."

Exactly this. After close to two decades building for the platform, the mindset is really to be cautious and make sure everything is rock solid before shipping.

This has more to do with building up a quality tool chain and testing process than being slow.

But sometimes there is a need to ship over the air updates, and for that (on Kotlin) there is Zipline [0] from Cashapp. I haven't used it in anger yet, but I know some people who do and trust it.

[0]: https://github.com/cashapp/zipline

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

#697

Post by csomar »

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…

Shopify supports multiple countries both as a buyer/seller. I assume there is all kind of customizations needed to comply with each country weird rules. Are all of these software engineers doing core engineering? Probably not. But they are probably tagged as software engineers within the organization.

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

#698

Post by protocolture »

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 “engineering” Spotify is doing, it’s the worst app I’ve used in my life.

Engineering is app usability. Theres no other possible thing an engineer might do. Chrome ofc has infrastructure to distribute a binary. Spotify of course having a global content delivery network for terabytes of music. Hey GANG CAN WE WOKK OUT WHAT THESE ENGINEERS MIGHT BE DOING?????? WHY HASNT JIM STORAGE ENGINEER IMPLEMENTED A UI REFRESH YET!!!!

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

#699

Post by sgt »

aatd86 wrote: post #422
uncomputation wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is SwiftUI dated? It uses a declarative model. I don’t see UI framework paradigms shifting that much.

It is virtual dom like. We don't have access to a stable underlying element like we would with plain UIKit. You can build declarative models without this virtualdomness. But SwiftUI was created during the react boom so they went with the Zeitgeist, understandably. Now this is somewhat problematic if someone wants to implement better fine grained reactive systems. And I posit that the next paradigm is going to be in t…

This is such a clueless take, and I see it surprisingly often. Declarative UI does not inherently mean virtual DOM nor does it "automatically" mean slower than UIKit.

The abstraction is huge advantage, especially when targeting different devices and screen sizes. We (and that includes Apple) have been learning the value of those kinds of abstraction boundaries for years, well before React.

It's also important to note that SwiftUI and UIKit are composable, so if some small part of your app needs low-level, finer grained control, then go ahead and use UIKit/Core Animation/Metal and SwiftUI for the rest.

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