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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

#971

Post by pezo1919 »

masom wrote: post #128
jgalt212 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there's no proprietary IP in your company's app that you don't mind being sucked up into the training data?

> there's no proprietary IP in your company's app For most app that concept is "gone". People routinely decompile and recompose existing binaries, and if you use "obfuscation" in your app it's still a small bump. In today's age, IP is no longer a tangible concept that gives any advantages in software. What differentiates two businesses isn't their IP, it's their relationships and their moat. Most vendors that had pro…

Can you back these claims, please?

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

#972

Post by kotaru »

tcoff91 wrote: post #461
nfw2 wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an implication here that the back button is a microcosm that represents the differences holistically but it's not. It's a small one-off exception that doesn't even affect the design choices made for the various apps. As I open up app over app on my Android (Audible, Spotify, ChatGPT, etc.), they all have clear in-app "back" functionality where needed. No apps I have installed rely on the Android back button…

Also, the back 'button' is mostly a thing of the past in Android and it's more similar to iOS now with the predictive back gesture. The Android back button is legacy.

It's literally still a back button, doesn't matter if it's a gesture, physical button or button on a bottom of the screen. The result is always the same action in the same place no matter the app used.

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

#973

Post by pezo1919 »

gib444 wrote: post #688
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

Jeez, I did not even realize that! That’s a very good point (in general)!

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

#974

Post by xandrius »

lmf4lol wrote: post #370

Yesterday, just before bedtime, I pointed Astra at our Electron Desktop app, and asked it to write me a native Swift app for iOS. The electron app has 750 unit tests and 50 something integration tests. It also had access to the electron app via mcp and could click around and inspect it. I also gave Astra read only access to the backend code. It worked for 3 hours and delivered a nearly feature complete port. Today, I…

We believed that the craft was typing the code while the real skill is to create something solving someone's problem. Whether that's done by punching holes in cards, writing esoteric letter combinations decided back in the 80s or using any natural language I so wish, to me it's the same. I just like getting there faster and while I'm grabbing a cup of tea.

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

#975

Post by frabcus »

tebbers wrote: post #917
frabcus wrote: post #822

Hmmm, the article doesn't really say what is better about the Swift/Kotlin apps, compared to React Native. All we get is: "Native keeps us closer to platform capabilities and first-party tooling, with fewer framework and dependency layers between our code and the platform" What's the user benefit of that? It's not speed, they say "React Native apps can be fast. Ours are." I'd expect it to be considerably easier for a…

I'd imagine the user benefit is they can tap new operating system APIs and features almost immediately versus having to wait for a React Native package or having to build a React Native bridge. I think everyone would agree that native apps are better in every way, but the thing is, as a small company, you can't justify hiring two different developers - hence why RN is usually a good choice to get off the ground with.

Right, but they could get their AIs to quickly add new features to React Native! It makes no sense.

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

#977

Post by yes1would »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #948
yes1would wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you read the article? Or like, even google it? Because yes, they are 100% literally Nazis.

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

#978

Post by dragonwriter »

yes1would wrote: post #658
profdevloper wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

No, literally a small-f fascist, the broader far-right authoritarian ideology named by reference to the Nazi’s Italian ideological cousins but which includes the Nazis among is defining examples, but not literally a member of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party.

(Sure. “Nazi” is frequently used figuratively to mean “fascist”, but that's not “literally”. Except, perhaps, in the sense where literally is itself used figuratively as a intensifier for a figurative description, but at least not literally “literally”.)

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

#979

Post by klrefg »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #598

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…

And how many engineers does Google have? The people working on Chrome are a tiny, numerically insignificant fraction of Google’s employees. A much better comparison would be people working on Google ads and their other commercial products.

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

#980

Post by klrefg »

RobKohr wrote: post #953
hilariously wrote: post #858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Twitter is an empty shell though. Yes it technically works, that’s about that.
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