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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

#881

Post by Someone »

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…

> 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.

It also was reusing the WebKit browser engine, work on which started in the 20th century (as KHTML)

As to Shopify needing zillion of engineers: does their backend query seller APIs? If so, I expect many of their engineers work on keeping that working.

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

#883

Post by gaws »

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…

> Numbers from GPT Astra

Come on.

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

#884

Post by bcjdjsndon »

oceansky wrote: post #854
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think you overestimate the competence of interviewers. They could well give you terrible advice

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

#885

Post by bcjdjsndon »

gib444 wrote: post #689
meowtimemania wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another scary thing is with AI it's easy to let complexity get out of hand to the point where a human manually writing code is basically impossible. Even though AI might seem capable of handling the complexity, you'll start noticing all these weird bugs pop up all over your codebase.

I'd say that was even a goal of the AI companies. It's not in their interest to generate human-maintainable code

Aren't there open models you can get for free? What are their intentions?

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

#887

Post by vietthan »

2020-01-29: https://shopify.engineering/react-native-future-mobile-shopi... ("After years of native mobile development, we’ve decided to go full steam ahead building all of our new mobile apps using React Native.")

2021-11-08: https://shopify.engineering/high-performance-hydrogen-powere... ("The future of commerce is dynamic, contextual, and personalized. Hydrogen is a React-based framework for building custom and creative storefronts powered by Shopify’s platform and APIs.")

2025-01-13: https://shopify.engineering/five-years-of-react-native-at-sh... ("React Native has come a long way in the last 5 years and a lot of limitations that led people to not adopt it simply don’t exist anymore. If you haven’t tried using RN in a while, now would be a good time to revisit it.")

2025-09-05: https://shopify.engineering/react-native-new-architecture ("We successfully migrated two of our largest apps, Shopify Mobile and Shopify Point of Sale (POS) to React Native's New Architecture")

2026-09-10: https://shopify.engineering/back-to-native ("React Native was working well for us, and it remains an excellent framework. But since then, coding models have gotten dramatically better, and for our apps and our team, building the same feature in Swift and Kotlin no longer carries the cost it used to.")

^ to show the timeline of things.

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

#888

Post by adjejmxbdjdn »

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…

Shopify as a company works on a lot more products than Chrome developers do.

More relevantly, a lot of their work involves interfacing with hundreds, if not thousands, of external partners, competitors, etc. systems.

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

#889

Post by ToucanLoucan »

oskxekxmekdj wrote: post #454
xp84 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assure you, developing for competing platforms is also a fucking nightmare... that's something Microsoft has no monopoly on!

And I assure you, developing for Mac is a delight, and Linux is not so bad either. Windows, however, fucking disgrace.

As an iOS dev who then got Mac development effectively for free in the bargain, fucking this. Xcode is not perfect, far from it, but it is still head, shoulders, cock and balls above every other toolset I've ever used, bar none. And while the IDE itself is like, mid, you simply can't beat the ease of use. Someone who has never built software for iOS or MacOS can fire up Xcode and have something running probably within an hour that does interesting stuff.

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

#890

Post by oceansky »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #884
oceansky wrote: post #854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think you overestimate the competence of interviewers. They could well give you terrible advice

I agree, but I don't have to take it at face value either. It is just one data point after all. Usually I am interviewing in many places.
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