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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

#821

Post by simondotau »

railka wrote: post #10
fnthawar2 wrote: post #2

We don’t hold on to a decision just because it was successful at the time. When a core assumption changes, we’re willing to go back and ask whether it’s still the right call. LLMs changed one of the core assumptions behind our 2020 decision, so we reevaluated our mobile stack from first principles. What we found led us back to native.

Yes, AI have changed the game, and now you can build and maintain two separate projects in Swift & Kotlin instead of one on React

“One React app vs two native apps” is a false comparison. A sufficiently polished React Native app still means two platforms to tune, test, debug, ship, and maintain. It gives you the appearance of efficiency and uniformity, but much of the complexity is just moved elsewhere… including, sometimes, to resource consumption on users’ devices.

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

#822

Post by myko »

whstl wrote: post #715
apitman wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think updating js without review is also against policy.

It's a grey area. App Review Guidelines §2.5.2 says: "Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app, including other apps" Technically Apple can punish you for anything but so far it seems to be accepted for small fixes and tweaks.

Doesn't seem like a grey area at all, pretty clear it is against the policy. Just a ridiculous policy and hard to enforce.

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

#823

Post by myko »

Dfiesl wrote: post #315
professoretc wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the screens should look different, right? That's the point of building separate iOS vs. Android versions is to make each version "native" to its platform. The feature-set should be the same, but the interfaces can diverge.

I think the whole native thing is more for better performance, debugging ease and dependency reduction rather than seeking variation in UIs.

It is both. You want the application to look correct on the platform the user is on, i.e. Liquid Glass on iOS and Material on Android.

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

#824

Post by frabcus »

Hmmm, the article doesn't really say what is better about the Swift/Kotlin apps, compared to React Native. All we get is:

"Native keeps us closer to platform capabilities and first-party tooling, with fewer framework and dependency layers between our code and the platform"

What's the user benefit of that? It's not speed, they say "React Native apps can be fast. Ours are."

I'd expect it to be considerably easier for a few people to use the AI to improve React Native with whatever matters, than for every company in the world to permanently maintain two apps.

And those improvements to React Native, would make all mobile apps easier for everyone to build forever more.

Are LLMs going to stop everyone collaborating, making libraries and platforms, and shared language and abstractions, because we can all vibe code our own thing? This seems a loss to cost and quality, even with lots of tokens available.

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

#825

Post by saagarjha »

Twisell wrote: post #640
InterviewFrog wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s what they said about Elon firing 80% of Twitter’s staff. But X is doing pretty well.

Twitter was never a profitable business. You actually renforce his point. (Maybe that was intended I might have missed some irony here)

I'm not sure why people keep repeating this when Twitter was profitable at the point that Elon bought it.

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

#826

Post by lackoftactics »

conmod278 wrote: post #118
lackoftactics wrote: post #7

I believe this will be overall trend in industry. Dropping React Native and Flutter for native

Can React Native become a sort of Compiler which compiles to natives (Android/Apple) now that AI can help in that direction as well? I don't know much about mobile ecosystem though.

the tricky part about React Native is that you almost always need to use it with expo.

I developed React native app for ios as side project and took breaks often and came back to have to do big updates with expo to make it work again. Maybe there is smoother process, but this was annoying

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

#827

Post by alt227 »

darkvertex wrote: post #753
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…

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

Recently listened is an automatic list like a log, not user curated. I would never expect to be able to delete things from that list.

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

#828

Post by saagarjha »

alex_sf wrote: post #615
SoftTalker wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So exactly what value are you adding, then?

I take the specifications from the customer and type them into the AI

One hopes you are better at that than the many others who are doing the same.

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

#830

Post by vendiddy »

frabcus wrote: post #824

Hmmm, the article doesn't really say what is better about the Swift/Kotlin apps, compared to React Native. All we get is: "Native keeps us closer to platform capabilities and first-party tooling, with fewer framework and dependency layers between our code and the platform" What's the user benefit of that? It's not speed, they say "React Native apps can be fast. Ours are." I'd expect it to be considerably easier for a…

I agree with you. I don't think LLMs magically solve the problem that comes with writing twice.

Even if they were to write for two platforms, they'd likely want to have a whole bunch of business & state management logic that would be shared between the two with the native part being a thin platform layer.

It seems like a mostly shared codebase (reglardless of specific tech choice) would let them get precisely the end user UX they care about. Both for performance and capability.

Not saying they should use React Native but maintaining two large apps and using LLMs to keep them in sync seems far worse than many other options.

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