Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 9:28 AM UTC

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…

Post by prisonguard » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 9:30 AM UTC

abustamam wrote: post #656

eptcyka wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that letting the LLM produce more output means that maintenance will be more expensive? I can easily see a world where claude and gpt are producing more tokens to sell you more tokens.

Just the other day I burned through my 5h quota twice in a row because I had opus spawn a review session on a medium sized PR and I don't know what happened but I told it to summarize to me and it said it spent 100M tokens throughout 50 subagent sessions. And more recently its been recommending that i install this new browser called Aside. I did, and it almost felt like I was installing malware so I Uninstalled it fa…

Post by prisonguard » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 9:33 AM UTC

littlecranky67 wrote: post #177

user43928 wrote: post #95

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You just install it on your phone and use the app. Maintainability concerns are entirely overblown by people who don't use agentic AI to develop large mobile apps, but anyway give their opinion as if they had that experience. I put in a few hundred hours, and I reached the same conclusion as Shopify. With reviews from other models and then a manual QA pass the result is fully usable.

Same result here just using plain Opus 4.8+. I had a web ap with a PWA approach. Now I have an iOS app written in Swift/SwiftUI and an Android app in Kotlin in the appstores. I do not know how to code a single line of Swift or Kotlin. You just test the app and iterate with the AI over it until it is stable and does what it should.

Post by bryanhogan » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 9:37 AM UTC

tonic_note wrote: post #243

Models have gotten a lot better at generating native iOS apps. The main appeal of RN was being able to leverage your web devs for mobile dev. that's what I did at my last company. And it's fine for a startup, but eventually you want dedicated native engineers bc each platform really deserves its own technical masters who can optimize for it. But now that all code is generated, there's little upside to having an RN ap…

Post by prisonguard » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 9:41 AM UTC

cschep wrote: post #642

user43928 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Codex and Claude Code desktop apps. I generally use only the SOTA, now Astra and Fable 5.1, Opus 5 when Fable runs out. I don't know if Gemini is suitable. I had few issues with my native iOS app, the results are just decent after a few iterations, the models do what I ask them to do. Where do you see the problem? The LOC for my app is now at almost 200k + 110k lines of test code.

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