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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

#731

Post by lynx97 »

wiseowise wrote: post #693
dmazzoni wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

This is plain wrong. For a browser, a11y doesn't just get handled by the OS automatically. In general, claiming a11y is easy or will be done by someone else is bordering on evil.

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

#732

Post by NavekG »

wiseowise wrote: post #693
dmazzoni wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The original Edge had to switch over to Chromium because it was hard to build a compliant accessible browser from scratch and this is Microsoft we are talking about.

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

#733

Post by psychoslave »

djtango wrote: post #654
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

That’s different difficulties.

Like comparing a climb and along run. Sure both require some physical abilities, but in the first case any error and the collapse mean dead end bringing progress to zero, while the second one you can rest on the side any time and still have the miles behind you accomplished.

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

#734

Post by sgammon »

wiseowise wrote: post #693
dmazzoni wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

We live in a time now where libraries are free and plentiful and pretty good. It is easy to forget that this was not the case for the vast majority of time that computers have existed.

Chrome’s original design definitely predates our current rich ecosystem. Plus, V8 and Chrome’s performance profile are demanding enough that there would be a pretty high bar for those dependencies anyway.

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

#735

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

When it comes to number of engineers, always keep in mind that it costs more engineers to maintain (and understand) software than the initial development push.

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

#736

Post by stingraycharles »

harrouet wrote: post #723
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it astounding? They have one of the biggest e-commerce applications in the world. A mobile app for shoppers. A payment system and mobile wallet app. A shipment tracking system. Tax and small business software. They have their own lending arm with its own software. They have multiple frameworks for other development teams to make super customizable e-commerce sites. They support Remix and Tailwind among other s…

Plus they have an Amazon-scale infrastructure to manage...

I think Amazon is very much on another level in terms of scale. Not trying to be negative about Shopify — they have a very large system to maintain - but Amazon is just on another level.

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

#737

Post by T4iga »

dominus103 wrote: post #681
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.

I am quite curious about what people hat so much about Spotify. I made some excursions the last few years to competitors like Tidal and Apple Music but I just found myself coming back because the Spotify mobile app experience (and desktop) was just plain better.

I wonder what gripes people have.

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

#738

Post by _flux »

psychoslave wrote: post #733
djtango wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That’s different difficulties. Like comparing a climb and along run. Sure both require some physical abilities, but in the first case any error and the collapse mean dead end bringing progress to zero, while the second one you can rest on the side any time and still have the miles behind you accomplished.

It's externally mandated difficulties vs internally created ones. I think the latter should always be easier, because you can change the requirements.

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

#739

Post by sgammon »

abustamam wrote: post #653
austin-cheney wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you are selling the code as the product, it could be said to be an “actual” software product, rather than a mechanism for selling other products, or software as a substrate for some other business.

Those other businesses aren’t any less valid, of course. They just aren’t software businesses. They are businesses that (quite sensibly) use software.

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

#740

Post by user43928 »

cloudfudge wrote: post #718
willsmith72 wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how much parallelism are you writing in your frontends?

The problem with everything being single threaded isn't so much that you want to do a lot of parallel processing, but that you don't want to have the occasional fat loop cause the whole engine to start stuttering. If you want butter smooth scrolling while there's (for example) a lot of dynamic content moving around, you want very precise control of the threading so you can get the gnarly stuff done without causing hi…

The browser, iOS, and Android all use a main thread separate from the thread responsible for scrolling animations.

However, I think it's true that controlling threading in order to perform gnarly work in a separate thread is more ergonomic on mobile than in JS/React.

You'd need to create a Promise that wraps a Web Worker, which would be an unusual thing to use. I don't think most apps need such control over threading in the browser.

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