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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

#781

Post by prisonguard »

user43928 wrote: post #192
asdfsa32 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am using Gemini as well as Opus on a somewhat small project in React Native and I can not imagine this thing being able to build the whole thing on its own without it being a dumbpster fire. Can you share some details of how you work? What models? What harness?

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.

what in the gobbledygook is this

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

#782

Post by melodyogonna »

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 you see seemingly simple products have too many engineers, most are almost always there to cater for enterprise customers.

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

#783

Post by joenada »

This thread is very depressing. Web dev bootcamps and product managers have done untold damage to the field of software engineering. And it's our own faults. We had it so good for so long. There was a period of time when programmers were the new "rockstars" (for better or worse). We should have used that respect and those resources to unionise and build some kind of institution responsible for teaching, mentoring, standards, etc - a software engineering guild of some sorts.

Quality is, was and always will be job one. There's obviously a place for AI tools (providing the economy doesn't melt), but can we please just slow down for a second and think about what we're actually doing?

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

#784

Post by croes »

Daishiman wrote: post #607
croes wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t know the language you can’t evaluate if the models really found bugs. That’s like translating a text to another language without knowing the language

This is wildly overblown. I've been working with agents for a good while, read tens of thousands of generated Python and the language factor is actually the part they get right that humans don't.

Do you know Python?

What do you think has more training data Python or Kotlin?

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

#786

Post by hypendev »

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, importantly, this was 2008.

Most of the modern software tooling you have today wasn't available back then, from great IDE's to popular libraries, writing software in 2008 was a different beast compared to today.

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

#787

Post by coredev_ »

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.

It's cool to hate on Spotify now I guess. But I agree with you, Spotify works really well for me.

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

#788

Post by Epa095 »

hypendev wrote: post #786
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…

And, importantly, this was 2008. Most of the modern software tooling you have today wasn't available back then, from great IDE's to popular libraries, writing software in 2008 was a different beast compared to today.

Tja, besides LLMs I can't really see the major improvement todays IDEs and language combination brings over Eclipse+Java. Great docs, good autocomplete, good compiler feedback.

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

#789

Post by faet »

rtpg wrote: post #617
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…

> 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! Just so it is said: my understanding is it's really easy to not end up on the credits list for games despite having worked on it. I don't know if contractors end up on there for example, at least beyond some team leads or the like. I don't know R*'s po…

https://www.rockstargames.com/gta-v/thankyou

They have updated their policies a bit. You may not be in the game credits but you'll show up here.

FWIW the social club team which handled a lot of the online components was small around the time GTA5 released. They built the APIs to handle user generated content, telemetry, accounts, etc. But, there were other team members that made it so the game would call said APIs.

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

#790

Post by canto »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #384
canto wrote: post #351

So, instead of paying humans twice for the same thing, Shopify will pay corporations to burn the planet a little bit more, waste water and energy - to build the same thing twice. Just because. There's no tech reason to do it. "LLMS are better now". There's no low level optimisations, no blockers, no app shortcomings, it's a shopping app for Christ sake. Instead of optimising, creating more with less, they will create…

> Just because. There's no tech reason to do it. They made a separate article on why, which they linked to. Performance is significantly better. The native Android app launches twice as fast for example

and only 23% on iOS. Now while those can initially seems significant, it's still a web app, doh, a web page, that loads non deterministic stuff. Even in their tests, the page that loads native vs RN is simply... different. Different things take different time to load, yeah, who would have though. Not even mentioning that this "performance" is only app startup, lol. Ah, sorry, my bad, 120fps when browsing items on the web.

Don't get me wrong I don't have anything against AI, I'm a heavy user myself, but refactoring everything just for the sake of it and bragging on HN with little to no tangible effects - that's a whole different story.

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