Finally some common sense. Time to put electron to rest.
Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
301–310 of 962 posts
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you saying you don’t trust ZDR claims from inference providers? They don’t care about your code. There’s more and better data on the public web.
Isn't ZDR only the case if you "opt out" through a setting? Lots of opportunities to make a mistake here, or for the LLM provider to play games. You could be unaware of the setting. The provider could reset the setting upon subscription lapse/renewal, application update, model release, etc. A developer could accidentally use their personal subscription (w/ setting on) on a work codebase. Also what's the timing on thi…
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]: For example when I worked at Google, the proprietary google3 codebase cannot exist on laptops because there are no tools to download it to your laptop.
[1]: For example Claude code supports having a gateway: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/llm-gateway-connect
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#303I'm sitting here at my desk overlooking Cordova Street. The street that Apache Cordova is named after. I've seen this debate for almost two decades now. Teams jump on the latest cross-platform framework assuming that it will reduce headcount cost at the expense of having a lowest-common denominator app on each platform. The latter is true but the former is false. What ends up happening is that teams start as 20 iOS e…
> I'm sitting here at my desk overlooking Cordova Street. The street that Apache Cordova is named after. I've seen this debate for almost two decades now. The debate has been taking place on the actual street?
We practically heckled and threw rotten tomatoes across it at each other.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#304I wish more companies would just focus on webapps. It's infuriating how many services try to push an app on you when it's completely unnecessary. The other day I went to a restaurant that had an app. Not a fast food chain, a nice full-service place. No, I'm not going to download an app to order dinner.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are you evaluating the Android build if you don’t use Android and you don’t know Kotlin?
You just install it on your phone and use the app. Maintainability concerns are entirely overblown by people who don't use agentic AI to develop large mobile apps, but anyway give their opinion as if they had that experience. I put in a few hundred hours, and I reached the same conclusion as Shopify. With reviews from other models and then a manual QA pass the result is fully usable.
I work as a professional app developer. And I find this take to be naive.
Most of the time when I review code from AI, there is always something to improve.
It’s either a maintenance issue. e.g., Opus recommended and implemented a fix for a database corruption crash. This was ~400 lines of code with many moving parts. I reviewed, and found out Android Room library already handles this recovery case, and all I needed was a 10 liner PR that catches this exception and ignores it.
The maintenance is not only the burden on the human and LLM. With too many moving parts, it becomes harder and harder to build and verify the correctness of future features. Yes you can write test for this and that, but it didn’t need to exist in the first place.
The second problem is correctness issues. Especially the edge cases. You cannot just manually test out a race condition on a phone! Sometimes it happens! Sometimes it doesn’t! If it leads to a visible signal like a crash, then yes, you can try to reproduce it. But there are a lot of these that are “silent” and would just lead to bad experiences.
We already had a software quality crisis! And I think such views only exacerbate the situation! Quality matters!
And this is not an anti-AI stance. I vibe code personal projects where I don’t even look at the code. But when I use AI as a professional engineer, I act like a professional. Because these products do have an impact on people’s lives.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously! What a bonkers thing to claim. "I had codex use maestro so I assume it made Android work well and idiomatically". It's a fine project to do but clearly they put zero value on being familiar with the project's codebase/stack and ecosystem, which makes me feel fear in my heart when I imagine the first "production is down" page coming in. I already hated mobile because it's so much harder to maintain than web…
I wrote every single line of the react native app we ported, and maintained it for 9 years. So suffice to say, I'm familiar with the code. But I am going to always prioritize the user experience over a developer (like myself)'s need for satisfaction to see code. And a pure native app is _always_ going to behave better than react native. This gives me a chance to do that.
> And a pure native app is _always_ going to behave better than react native.
Maybe iOS is better about consistency, but I've used enough horribly made Android apps that I would not expect one that's vibe coded to behave better than a professionally made react native version.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are you evaluating the Android build if you don’t use Android and you don’t know Kotlin?
Seriously! What a bonkers thing to claim. "I had codex use maestro so I assume it made Android work well and idiomatically". It's a fine project to do but clearly they put zero value on being familiar with the project's codebase/stack and ecosystem, which makes me feel fear in my heart when I imagine the first "production is down" page coming in. I already hated mobile because it's so much harder to maintain than web…
> this yolo approach would give me constant dread.
When you’re completely ignorant, there’s nothing to be afraid of.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#308It is the "why use python" for mobile. The native apps will definitely be better in terms of performance and UX. However, having 2 codebases means twice the tokens.
I came here to say this. I also prefer fully native apps but this is the elephant in the room. If most of your web code can be re-used on native, that's a ton of tokens you won't have to pay for.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously! What a bonkers thing to claim. "I had codex use maestro so I assume it made Android work well and idiomatically". It's a fine project to do but clearly they put zero value on being familiar with the project's codebase/stack and ecosystem, which makes me feel fear in my heart when I imagine the first "production is down" page coming in. I already hated mobile because it's so much harder to maintain than web…
First “production is down” page means you just tell codex production is down and to fix it.
Presumably a sarcastic post, but this is actually going to be how things are done soon. I had a box that OOMed and needed to be rebooted every few weeks. It was a disaster recovery standby box so figuring out what was going on never rose to the top of my priority list. So I asked Claude to dig into it (proxying the commands it wanted to run through me) and in an hour it had diagnosed the problem, fixed it, and taught me a bunch about memory usage in our system on modern kernels.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#310Models have gotten a lot better at generating native iOS apps. The main appeal of RN was being able to leverage your web devs for mobile dev. that's what I did at my last company. And it's fine for a startup, but eventually you want dedicated native engineers bc each platform really deserves its own technical masters who can optimize for it. But now that all code is generated, there's little upside to having an RN ap…
This is true in a very real sense – models can help you build native apps very quickly, no question. But how do you keep them from drifting apart from one another as you add/change features or design? Right now, there isn't much tooling for this. React Native's advantage of having a single source of truth for code hasn't quite gone away yet, imo.
i think you would have your coding agent work on both code bases at the same time. You could also task with generating identical tests for each platform. It's easier for a model to keep up with that kind of tedium than a human. Plus you can just tell the model to keep re-doing things until you're happy and it won't quit.
Also, having agents trace and document every logic path to compare with another codebase works well in my experience. It can certainly do that better than me, i would give up and start taking shortcuts pretty early in a process like that.