Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

shopify.engineering

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

871–880 of 963 posts

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

#871

Post by boutell »

When so many people talk about companies going with React "because AI knows React," it's interesting to see Shopify draw the opposite conclusion: AI "knows" all major platforms and frameworks, so at a certain scale it makes sense to let AI handle cross-platform development as a translation problem.

Modern LLMs evolved from translation models, and they still seem to work best at translation-shaped problems. Even if you are asking them to translate specs to code, or code for system A to code for system B.

In my case, I added SQLite and Postgres adapters to a formerly MongoDB-specific CMS, including support for a largely compatible API, "in one wild weekend..." followed by lots of verification. That was only practical because we already had a large test suite. But it was still a task that would have been out of the question for our team size before Opus 4.6 or so. Again, it was very much a translation-shaped problem.

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

#872

Post by nish__ »

cwackerfuss wrote: post #674
abustamam wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shopify works well for me but it used to push nonsense like podcasts or audio books that I had no interest in, with no way for me to hide them. I just want to listen to music. Upon looking just now, seems like they have been relegated to their own tabs now, which is great.

I can’t tell if we’re trolling at this point with the mixing up of Shopify and Spotify

It's accidental. This mixup is essentially a meme at Shopify this point.

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

#873

Post by [deleted] »

Hendrikto wrote: post #754
T4iga wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-c…

[deleted]

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

#874

Post by bcjdjsndon »

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.

Sounds like you're describing the shit show that is web development

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

#875

Post by cucumber3732842 »

hilariously wrote: post #862
Keyframe wrote: post #838

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with what you're saying that it's not exactly what we're seeing which makes it not as simple. However, I've seen this play out in many a big companies where there's a big mess going on. Answer is always similar pointing to -> "clearly it's not simple" and that's kind of the whole point. They made it not simple. 3k ENGINEERS, my sweet dude. THREE THOUSAND. By any and all account that's half as much as current…

Taxes, compliance, regulatory bodies, logistics multiplied by X countries X products has an amazing way to bog you down. If you have money and problems money solves (eg you could hire more people to do something) you do not have a problem (except for people on the internet making arguments from personal inexperience)

> If you have money and problems money solves (eg you could hire more people to do something) you do not have a problem

If you have money there's a greater chance that someone in that X by X matrix might see you as a juicy target to go after so your expensive handling of every item in that matrix needed to be better still.

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

#876

Post by danielrmay »

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 had an eerily similar experience interviewing at a similar public SaaS co recently.

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

#877

Post by bcjdjsndon »

sgammon wrote: post #734
wiseowise wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rubbish. Most of the stuff you’re listing is handled by OS and frameworks themselves, you don’t need hundreds of SE to handle RTL or a11y. I work in one of those companies, most people just regurgitate existing shit into another form of shit and collect salary (not complaining, as I’m one of them, but let’s be honest).

We live in a time now where libraries are free and plentiful and pretty good. It is easy to forget that this was not the case for the vast majority of time that computers have existed. Chrome’s original design definitely predates our current rich ecosystem. Plus, V8 and Chrome’s performance profile are demanding enough that there would be a pretty high bar for those dependencies anyway.

> We live in a time now where libraries are free and plentiful and pretty good.

Specifically what are you talking about here? Chrome is c++ I thought?

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

#878

Post by _flux »

desterothx wrote: post #840
aurareturn wrote: post #75

How long until LLMs just write machine code?

IMO it doesn't make sense for LLMs to write machine code, because abstraction allows them to have more information density. As context size is a big limitation right now, cluttering it with less dense information seems like a bad idea.

What actually might could make sense in the future would be super-dense but abstraction-able programming language made for models. Then you'd train the model to work with it and you could have a way to render a human-readable version of the program for introspection.

It preferably come with superior guard rails, so strict static typing, borrow checker if not gc, perhaps ability to state proofs, etc.

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

#879

Post by huflungdung »

pavelstoev wrote: post #613
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…

What are we talking about here - Spotify or Shopify ? If Shopify - and you are concerned about their engineering teams, please consider that Shopify's revenue grew from roughly $205 million in 2015 to $11.56 billion in 2025, reflecting an explosive compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 45% across the past decade. Market validates ! I have nothing to add about Spotify - I use it to listen to music and it works we…

[dead]

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

#880

Post by moomoo11 »

whstl wrote: post #490
paxys wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the “makes sense or not” part can change based on a bunch of factors. It’s actually pretty common for a new company to start fully native (only iOS, few features, limited scope), then switch ro react native/electron (need to support more surfaces, features are being developed too quickly), then back to fully native (can afford individual dev teams for each platform).

Another factor is design. A lot of companies go to React Native, etc, because they want one single non-native design on both platforms. Which IMO can be a mistake most of the time, especially from the POV of a user.

most users can’t even use their phones properly

it is always the nerds (i’m a nerd, but also run a company and led teams before at a unicorn that IPOd) who obsess over things that normal people would probably not even come to given 100 years

case in point: even some of apples own apps don’t follow their design language.

also some of the most popular apps in the world like tiktok or x don’t use ios glass.

my bank app doesn’t use it and opts for a single theme across platforms.

and you know what? i don’t give a fuck. i just want my money transferred properly, my memes consumed on demand, and that’s about it.

Post reply on HN