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Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

shopify.engineering

951–960 of 963 posts

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

#951
post #377

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Yikes. What apps have they been doing this with?

Turns out I was mistaken. Outlook was rewritten for Webview, not Electron. So still took a native application and turned it into web nonsense, but I got the specifics wrong. Regardless, there are a bunch of new visual glitches in the release, with regressed performance all over the place.

Having just switched from Google Workspace + Mac to all-Microsoft + Windows, it's been so difficult adjusting. I can choose between two desktop versions of Outlook or the Web, and I just use the Web because it's the least weird and somehow faster than the new desktop app (which is just the PWA one anyway).

But I still have to open a modal just because I dragged a meeting from one time to another. This version of Outlook is, slowly, getting better though.

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

#952

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>Spotify has progressively gotten much worse over the last 15 years, all while the size of their engineering team has ballooned. Spotify or Shopify?

Spotify, the comment I replied to drew a comparison from Shopify to Spotify. I think I’ll start a company called Shpoptify.

Slopify

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

#953
post #457

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I'd wager many software startups out there would consider their code valuable IP (even if in the AI era it's not), and don't have these types of IT controls in place. Startups I worked at gave you an email account, github access to their private repos, and that was that. Heck, you don't even need to mix up a personal and business AI subscription. For the vast majority of folks one day their IDE "updated" and a bunch…

You are merely describing companies that aspire to consider their code valuable IP, not companies that actually do so. IDE updated? It’s the company IT’s job to perform testing before distributing those updates. And also their job to use whatever managed settings to disable those unmanaged AI features.

Yeah man I think we just have experience in two different worlds.

A single digit headcount startup with a "company IT" team testing program updates before distributing them??? Um, no. You just download VS Code (or whatever IDE you want) on the Macbook they give you and it updates when Microsoft pushes a public update.

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

#954

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What, exactly, is a "literal Nazi" -- I think Tobi is German, but he seems more like a capitalist than a national socialist. /shrug

https://drewdevault.com/weird-guys/#lutke Literally a Nazi. His best friend and the COO is the founder of the Canadian equivalent of Breitbart, and also, they hosted the store for Breitbart...

So literally not Nazis… but you have been programmed to go to extremes in any political disagreement. I suspect they are both better informed and likely better members of society than you giving evidence of.

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

#955

Why not flutter?

See the first post, they have 6000 engineers.

Their reasoning’s and opinions on anything are useless to compare to almost anyone.

We’re using Flutter successfully and love it. I don’t have 6 engineers to throw at Native, let alone 6000.

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

#956

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 cr…

Seems a lot like the meme of the new designers pushing a redesign to justify their existence. To be less dismissive it seems an industry wide problem that big splashy projects get rewarded while the silent “Snow Leopard” mind numbingly obvious just up your quality and fix bugs and UX issues work goes unnoticed.

If it ain't broke, fix it.

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

#957

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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.

Sounds like the wxWidgets approach. I've never seen it work, but good luck.

Hard pass on the PHP though!

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

#958

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Do you even escape dependency hell this way?

Yeah, with iOS for example, you typically need very little third party dependencies for functionality. The main ones are things like analytics, crash reports, etc I’m not aware of any attacks on native package managers in the past 5 years. The closest would be a poisoned Xcode build in China that wasn’t downloaded from Apple a while back. Also getting an attack on one of the platforms means at least ~half your users…

I remember there being a lot of hijacked CocoaPods more recently than that Xcode attack. But supposedly Swift Package Manager is actually replacing CocoaPods now, which tbh I didn't even know until now because I've been out of that loop.

So that's good. One of my larger gripes with native Mac/iPhone dev was always needing to rely on a third-party package manager with all its quirks.

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

#959
post #827

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15 years of extremely well paid engineers and yet we still cannot delete a track from Recently Listened. ಠ _ ಠ

Recently listened is an automatic list like a log, not user curated. I would never expect to be able to delete things from that list.

[deleted]

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

#960

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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)

I think there is something like Parkinson's Law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

This is more like the engineering team scales to match your budget.

It is why successful companies, when starting out and getting to their defining project completion state have significantly less engineers then 10 years later when they are massively more successful.

The cost of having the engineers is nothing compared to the profits, so why not hire more so you can defend your position. Are 80% of them needed to keep the system going, I think Elon showed that you can prune most of them away and the system will keep humming along (ignoring some initial problems). The trouble is bureaucracy, lack of technical knowledge at the top, and the hazy difficulty of identifying what is needed is really difficult, and if you mess it up, you could ruin a billion dollar business to save a hundred million dollars in salaries.

That is the crux of it. You can't know who to cut, and even if you are really good at it, you will still create problems and create ill will. Elon was pretty successful, but it did have some momentary problems. If his negative cult of personality didn't get in the way, it would have been better off.

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