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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

#751

Post by avicado0o »

ashishb wrote: post #564
atonse wrote: post #31

We did the same thing - had 90% of it overnight. Then spent a few days in the background tweaking for polish. Our app is smaller, and has about 15-20 screens. I started at about 12:30am by giving codex a goal and it inventoried every screen based on the react native code, then created android and iOS directories, used maestro (I had already set up this tooling for a previous personal app build a few weeks prior), and…

React native is broadly an inferior option. LLMs made it way worse https://ashishb.net/tech/react-native/

this is from 2021....

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

#752

Post by hirako2000 »

z3t4 wrote: post #692
Vegenoid wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Such book could be distilled in simple essence:

- stay out of it for your sanity

- sell your soul, organically adapt by looking at those who make it to the top fast

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

#753

Post by darkvertex »

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…

15 years of extremely well paid engineers and yet we still cannot delete a track from Recently Listened. ಠ _ ಠ

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

#754

Post by Hendrikto »

T4iga wrote: post #737
dominus103 wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The website, desktop app, and mobile apps all have different feature sets, for one. There are things that you can only do in one of them, but it is a different one of them for each thing. There is no one feature set. It feels so cobbled together, with each platform doing their own thing.

Also, the website is slow and buggy, and the Electron “desktop” app is even worse. Both gobble up way too many resources and soft-crash constantly. The app does not lock up, but simply stops working. Often it even shows an error like “Spotify cannot play this song right now.”.

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

#756

Post by [deleted] »

user43928 wrote: post #740
cloudfudge wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#757

Post by yanis_t »

I was just recently thinking about how we have built a lot of abstractions that makes it easier for a human to do useful stuff but they usually come with their own set of trade-offs.

And now in the LLM era, there's is less and less justification for using those very high level abstractions, and we'll see many of them die out in the upcoming years. React (native or not) is not exception.

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

#758

Post by joenada »

user43928 wrote: post #225
nicce wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You just install it on your phone and use the app. Some people on the cybersecurity side are starting to cry....

I have been getting these comments often here, including concerns about my non existent backend's security. Last time, when I pointed out that the attack surface for mobile apps is typically very small, some users started to talk about zero day vulnerabilities in the OS's media handling, as if it was a concern for my app implementation. I found the concerns again wildly overblown.

You sound like a person who's never had their app pen tested. The attack surface is anything but small if you're working with any kind of sensitive data.

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

#759

Post by Cthulhu_ »

hectdev wrote: post #482

As an iOS Engineer that has been fighting the battle against every C-level type who brings up the subject of a shared codebase my whole career, I feel very validated.

I'm inclined to agree on certain points; true native apps are, generally speaking, better when it comes to e.g. customer experience. It comes with risks and costs (but I think the cost vs benefit is exaggerated) - risk being the ability to find good native developers, which aren't as common as e.g. web developers who can switch to RN fairly easily.

But there's a factor few people (that decide on using RN) miss; it adds a layer of indirection, so you're no longer as "in touch" with the underlying platform. While possible, few RN developers would consider adding widgets or smart watch apps to their main app, but (I feel like) if you're a native iOS developer who is all-in on the Apple ecosystem, you're more likely to try and adopt these features (where applicable).

(disclaimer: RN is my current day job, used to do native iOS development and I frequently miss it)

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

#760

Post by UK-Al05 »

sgammon wrote: post #739
abustamam wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Shopify is literally selling software.
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