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
Well then I just have to ask why can't the customers type them directly into the AI?
Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
941–950 of 962 posts
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#942Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? The api has to be secure. Mobile os keeps the app safe. Where is the attack surface?
You don’t believe how often people leave secrets in the app or use webviews and iframes badly, misconfigure OAuth in client side and so on. There are many issues where secure API does not help.
Ok, yeah, I forgot that people do ship api keys inside binaries
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#943The true test here, which I don’t see much discussion around, isn’t how fast or how well agents can convert the existing apps to native; it’s how fast and how well the team can build entirely new features across platforms with native vs react. The existing app code is an unambiguous spec — perfect for agents to build from. Typical design specs, PRDs, and prompts have a lot more ambiguity. There’s a lot of iteration that needs to happen to get a feature from concept to launch and I’d wager that will not be as fast with the fully native approach.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#944Numbers 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…
5% is insanely generous for the YouTube example.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#945Earlier quoted context omitted.
You do realize that letting the LLM produce more output means that maintenance will be more expensive? I can easily see a world where claude and gpt are producing more tokens to sell you more tokens.
The models will only get better and inference cost will go down. I don’t see any reason to think the same thing that happens with all tech won’t happen here.
That's just a straight shooter with upper management written all over him
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#946Earlier quoted context omitted.
The compile and build times on iOS (and Android) are also painfully slow. They claim to have "hot reloading" but only under very specific conditions, and it's not the whole app. When you're working with UI in particular, you can often edit and text your changes 10x faster on React than native. You could argue that the quality "gains" you get from native are partially negated by the reduction in iteration speed. Quali…
Agreed, I’ve never used react native myself but I do use CapacitorJS to run JS (TS) apps and with a dev server I can hit save in my IDE and see it on my phone screen in Throughout my career, I found that the faster I can go from wanting to try something to seeing it working, the better. Without that quick iteration cycle, I end up, not trying certain things or trying to batch all of my changes which then makes it har…
Exactly. I wouldn’t be surprised if Shopify ended up building some tooling to try to solve this, but Apple in particular is remarkably disinterested in or perhaps inept at improving the developer experience, and agents won’t magically fix that.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#947Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. The point is that the goal (slick native apps) isn't blocked by the fact that it needs more code.
But if you could get slick native mobile apps with less code (i.e. higher quality abstractions), that would be better
Well yes, but if you want native apps there's no getting around making two apps.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#948Earlier quoted context omitted.
Video games are much easier than what Shopify do which will be a long tail of business cases and local permutations for all the countries they operate in. Commercial software is usually a simple core and a long tail of business exceptions
That’s different difficulties. Like comparing a climb and along run. Sure both require some physical abilities, but in the first case any error and the collapse mean dead end bringing progress to zero, while the second one you can rest on the side any time and still have the miles behind you accomplished.
It's complex vs complicated. A compiler may be very difficult to build but it is largely complicated.
Human issues are often complex and may not even have a real solution. Consider human issues like Brexit and the Good Friday Agreement - at face value they are a contradiction and yet a solution must be found.
Coding is absolute - trying to build software that can handle all these edge cases, let alone adapt to environmental changes like the law changing around you, when the decision makers have no insight (or interest) in the details is what makes software difficult.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#949Earlier quoted context omitted.
But if you could get slick native mobile apps with less code (i.e. higher quality abstractions), that would be better
Well yes, but if you want native apps there's no getting around making two apps.
You need to check out what we've been building with SuperNative - it's one codebase, but you end up with two truly native apps.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#950It's nice storytelling, but hard to take completely seriously. As others have commented, there's a lot that's not being said.
We may also look back on a (now-deleted?) tweet in which this company's CEO meme-trolled another engineering org. for their mobile decision-making. The overall tone here and over the past years comes off as holier-than-thou.