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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

#851

Post by raddan »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #794
Epa095 wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, IntelliJ 8 was out in 2008. From my experience most of the progress since then has been keeping up with language and library updates.

When Visual Studio (not VSCode) incorporated a time travel debugger, that felt like a major advance in an IDE. I don’t remember exactly when that was, but I think it was around 2013.

I am still a little stunned by the rapid adoption of VSCode over IntelliJ and the original Visual Studio. Maybe being free was the important part, but I still chafe at the idea that we should configure our tools using JSON instead of just, you know, buttons and checkboxes.

Of course, VSCode and its ilk are jam packed with AI stuff I don’t not want, so it is mostly back to a fancy text editor for me.

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

#852

Post by doginasuit »

Waterluvian wrote: post #28

If you put every company that needs/has an app on a spectrum, there is a line somewhere that roughly divides them into two groups: where Electron/React Native/etc. makes sense or not. It's just a normal engineering decision: solving problems given limited resources. Companies have different problems and different resources. I think people in the tech community have probably also noticed that it's rather popular to ha…

It is funny how the experience of finding a tool/platform that you love can be a little bit like joining a cult. You probably have experience using other things that were frustrating and this one seems like the answer. Each platform has its own tradeoffs and philosophies and embracing one can make the others seem backwards.

Its also funny how reality sometimes validates or punishes these loyalties, and that is reaching a fever pitch in the era of LLMs. Platforms that offer familiarity at the expense of complex or inefficient framework will naturally lose ground when familiarity is no longer at a premium. It is a good thing, all of the hard parts are a little easier and it is less tempting to take the shortcut that you know has a dead end somewhere.

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

#853

Post by vendiddy »

vendiddy wrote: post #57
asimovDev wrote: post #12

Dropping React and going back to raw JavaScript next? I am still mourning pre-React GitHub. Maybe rose-tinted glasses, but it was so pleasant to use

I would attribute that more to culture. For example https://diffs.com/ is built in React and it's basically instant.

Ok I stand corrected. Some have mentioned the React layer is very thin it's mostly vanilla JS!

I think my point still stands that, if MSFT cared, it would be fast. The issue is not the technology choice in this case.

For example, look at their demo here: https://diffshub.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30412

It's way faster than GitHub and you check the network tab.

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

#854

Post by oceansky »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #811
keithcarolus wrote: post #637

That Shopify employs 3,000 engineers is astounding. I was rejected after a fairly basic ML interview at Shopify and when I asked for feedback I was told someday I could become a machine learning engineer. I don’t think the interviewer read my resume or understood my responses as this was after working for several years in ML roles - staff applied ML and scientist. So maybe that tells you something.

> I asked for feedback Even if they gave you feedback I think you would have to take it with a pinch of salt. Hiring decisions are more emotional than most people would admit.

Even an emotional feedback could be potentially useful for self-improvement. Asking doesn't hurt.

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

#855

Post by vendiddy »

bob1029 wrote: post #83
vendiddy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would attribute that more to culture. For example https://diffs.com/ is built in React and it's basically instant.

I would attribute it to physics. If the entire page is rendered on the server, the information required to do so is presumably reasonably approximate (same datacenter). If most of the page is rendered on the client, the information needs to be pulled in from arbitrary physical distances. At some point the engineering really is this simple.

But this is way faster than GitHub isn't it:

https://diffshub.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30412

Compare that to this:

https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30412/changes

I agree there are limitations bc of physics, but I don't think it explains this particular difference.

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

#856

Post by stingraycharles »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #807
stingraycharles wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Amazon don't seem release any figures but I've seen estimates of 50,000 to 100,000 engineers. They do have 1.576 million employees worldwide (2025 figure).

Yes but “Amazon-scale infra” as the grandparent mentions should absolutely include AWS, and Shopify is nowhere near that size.

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

#857

Post by Zigurd »

The answer depends on scale, and appropriateness. If you've got enough engineers, you can do platform native code. The results will look better.

Appropriateness often comes down to is the code doing deep platform API things, with sensors for example, or anything else that's not part of user interface, but has an API that's going to require you to write platform native code.

Shopify clearly meets the first criterion, but are the commerce and security parts enough to drive the second criterion?

Anyway they're big enough to make a slightly less than optimal solution and still get a better result than sticking to a cross platform SDK.

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

#858

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

hectdev wrote: post #519
makeitdouble wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're looking at it from iOS side only, and for a US company that would be the last platform they'd ever drop. It was a different picture out of the Apple garden, when a company only brings their next major feature to iOS because they couldn't be bothered to hire the same headcount on two development teams and their CEO uses an iPhone anyway. We had that discussion about a decade ago with a company rep that didn't r…

Correct, I advocated for the solution that produced the best outcome for user experience, code and architecture simplicity, and prevented having to rewrite an app in the future in native. Which has been validated here. The android shortfall is a real one but I also pushed for hiring native android developers too.

As someone who has watched a team battle Xamarin and now Maui, and all the painful upgrades in between, I agree with you. Sure they never had the pain of supporting two separate codebases, but they also never had the luxury of doing anything the easy way.

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

#859

Post by IslandRebel »

stwrt wrote: post #66
exe34 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value of most companies/apps are in the relationship with the customers, so it's the database, not the code.

Definitely agree. Most developers could build a basic Twitter or Facebook clone. The hard part is getting the users, content, and relationships that make the product worth coming back to.

It is both tbh. Anyone can build a poor clone of an application. However there are many things that you don't realise is happening beneath the scene.

It is all the small things e.g.

YouTube Mobile website works really well when you have a inconsistent connection compared to the alternatives such as Odysee, Rumble, Kick and Twitch.

I can listen to a live stream or a video style podcast in the car and YouTube will resume the connection properly as long as the browser tab on my phone hasn't gone to sleep. Kick will just stop, if it is a replay it will resume from the start of the stream after rewinding the stream a few seconds while attempting playback.

While the code to do this isn't that difficult. YouTube has bothered to deal with the edge case of someone like me driving through an area with inconsistent connection while running their mobile site (not even their app).

Whenever people try to use alternatives, they often complain about poor reliability of the app. A lot of the clones are losing users and I doubt they really even know they are doing it.

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

#860

Post by hn-acct »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #78
joenada wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your assumptions are very outdated. App Store review times are typically < 24 hours and have been for the last couple of years. And KMP makes cross-platform a real thing now, rather than hacking a web view into a native shell, which was always the worst possible user experience.

Doesn't KMP assume your team is comfortable working in Kotlin?

Plus you’re trading RN problems for gradle and integration problems on iOS.
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