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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

#911

Post by _the_inflator »

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…

I don't share your opinion.

With no deeper knowledge to the matter, it is pretty senseless to speculate.

"Numbers from GPT Astra" - well, well...

Currently roughly 1000 engineers are working on Google Chrome.

GTA 6 has around 6000 developers working on GTA 6 since 2019.

So sounds a bit off what you allegedly researched. But, hey, AI slop is real.

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

#912

Post by exe34 »

IslandRebel wrote: post #859
stwrt wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 resu…

Is all this praise of YouTube on android or ios?

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

#913

Post by abustamam »

sgammon wrote: post #739
abustamam wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's an "actual software product" and why don't you think web products count as them? I'm a full stack web developer. I've worked for startups and F500 companies. There is always a push for release targets. The less technical the leadership, the stricter the release targets (its hard to sell a critical refactoring to management when they cant sell a shiny new feature or kpi to their own boss). We've kept our teams…

If you are selling the code as the product, it could be said to be an “actual” software product, rather than a mechanism for selling other products, or software as a substrate for some other business. Those other businesses aren’t any less valid, of course. They just aren’t software businesses. They are businesses that (quite sensibly) use software.

Is Facebook, a company that build software to sell ads, a software company or an ad company? I think its a bit bikesheddy, if not pointless, to try to confine companies to labels like this.

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

#914

Post by kccqzy »

saagarjha wrote: post #835
kccqzy wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mistakes you describe are only possible if the company doesn’t really think there’s proprietary IP in the codebase. If a company really believed there’s valuable IP in code, there would at a minimum, ban laptops or ban code on laptops[0], provide and maintain a centrally managed LLM gateway[1] that handles authentication, billing and model choice, have MDM to prevent you from using your own Claude login, etc. [0]…

Every company that is not Google lets you have code on your laptop. This is only an annoying thing that they came up with.

Mine doesn’t. They don’t even issue work laptops; work is done on desktops only.

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

#915

Post by IslandRebel »

exe34 wrote: post #912
IslandRebel wrote: post #859

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 resu…

Is all this praise of YouTube on android or ios?

I've had it work well on both (iOS and Graphene OS) using Brave browser on both. It is simply much better when you are on a unstable connection than any of the other sites.

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

#916

Post by written-beyond »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #885
gib444 wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Those models can never be capable enough to compare to the level of output generated by frontier labs. Where would you even host these models? Maybe a company like Shopify could manage self managing an few instances but that's it's own headache. Unless Shopify can show significant productivity gains by using ChatGPT or Anthropic's API pricing models there is no way they'll be able to justify using those services at those prices in the long term while maintaining their employee pool.

The other option is to just stay with ChatGPT and Anthropic and fire almost all of their employees, but then they're running the risk of having a significantly worse customer experience in case your development cycle gets out of hand. They'd have lost most of their internal knowledge in the layoffs so they'd be stuck.

If they don't do anything and just let their employees continue to work like they've always been but with LLMs to enhance productivity. Not to the point of implementing software factories, but as most people are using them in the industry. They lose nothing, gain productivity but their shareholders, investors and managers have been gaslit into believing if they're not 200x-ing their AI spending they're probably going to be left behind by competitors who are doing that.

Also some of their larger investors may have investments in other AI companies and they probably strong arm them into contracts with those companies to benefit their portfolio.

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

#917

Post by albatrossjr »

I've been a mobile developer for 15 years and being able to develop two codebases in parallel is by far the best productivity gain LLMs have to offer in this space.

These cross-platform SDKs try too hard to solve a very difficult problem and never last (looking at you Xamarin). My first job was actually working on a Lua framework that was shared between an Android and iOS codebase.

It's far better to tell claude to port your swift+core data implementation to kotlin+room then fix whatever it did then it is to try to debug a complicated view hierarchy that renders incorrectly on a specific Android version because you're framework decided to nest a list in a scroll view.

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

#918

Post by abustamam »

nish__ wrote: post #872
cwackerfuss wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I did some consulting for an e-commerce company that used Shopify, I had a Colombian coworker who kept confusing Shopify and Spotify which was contagious across our company but we always knew what we were referencing because we dont use Spotify to start an e-commerce page.

Similarly, we've had confusion with AWS Amplify and Amplitude (metrics service).

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

#920

Post by mitxela »

TuringTest wrote: post #748
hn993302 wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty well from an engineering perspective. But they've lost so many advertisers because it's intentionally not very moderated.

Pretty well if you don't mind some features being built twice or three times and appearing inconsistently at different screens, or users being able to bypass usage limits by pressing the back button on the usage limit sign...

The usage limit is trying to block scrapers and xcancel. It's already reset by the time your cursor gets to the back button.
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