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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

#551

Post by kccqzy »

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #472
spiderice wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is talking about the real advantage of RN: Being able to release to the App Store without having to go through a review. That's so massive. Getting a bug fix out to users instantly, sneaking in optimizations, etc.. Sure, you need a review to release native code changes, and you should probably get a review if you have big feature changes just for the sake of Apple not banning you. But in practice, it removes o…

Are you saying a native app can't make an http request and update the code they JIT?

Doing so would require the app to have the business logic written in JavaScript. Apple only allows JIT’ing JavaScript using JSC.

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

#552

Post by mohamedkoubaa »

whstl wrote: post #488
mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying a native app can't make an http request and update the code they JIT?

It can download Javascript (or other interpreted language, or config data), but you generally can't download and execute new compiled native code on iOS, due to iOS code-signing/executable-memory restrictions. Also keep in mind Apple might penalize you for dodging the review process and shipping new features, etc. (btw, one exception to the JIT rule is custom browsers for the EU)

Pardon my ignorance but can't an iOS app host a WASM runtime without being a browser? And if so it doesn't need to be an interpreted language necessarily.

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

#553

Post by mohamedkoubaa »

kccqzy wrote: post #551
mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying a native app can't make an http request and update the code they JIT?

Doing so would require the app to have the business logic written in JavaScript. Apple only allows JIT’ing JavaScript using JSC.

This seems to be a weaker claim than "RN is needed to do this", but practically speaking it might amount to that.

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

#554

Post by asdfsa32 »

freeplay wrote: post #364
chis wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there cybersecurity concerns in the frontend? I would have thought you have to assume the client is untrusted and only do security work on the backend

Nailed it. Assume your client is compromised and/or malicious regardless of how it was built.

This is the most naive take on security ever. For the backend, you assume your client is compromised, but you still don't want to allow your client to be compromised.

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

#555

Post by Fr0styMatt88 »

fishfasell wrote: post #476
Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is something we’ll see AI very meaningfully impact — the threshold needed for “Get this thing working on a tech stack we might not be familiar with” has gone waaaaaaay down.

It's worrying to say the least. Today it's "get this working", tomorrow it's "can it also do XYZ?", next week it's "we have a 40% spike in crashes, you MUST resolve this IMMEDIATELY!" Meanwhile the devs are furiously asking AI how to fix it, every flavor of every model will give you a different diagnosis, GH Copilot will throw a million high/critical at you, and you still have no idea if it's fixed or not. It's the e…

Yeah. It’s also far too tempting and far too easy to keep adding features if you don’t make yourself disciplined about it (which is okay if you’re in a position to control that, not so good if it’s the higher-ups demanding it).

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

#557

Post by stack_framer »

hn_submit wrote: post #341
pkaler wrote: post #43

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. 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've dumped all cross-platform frameworks as well. I tried many of them but they just weren't good enough, even for simple stuff. There were always glitches and teething problems that marred the overall quality compared to the native version. I'm currently maintaining versions for both iOS and Android.

How do you stay motivated to do this?! I've tried to start my app in React Native multiple times, but it always sucks, so I finally started learning Swift. I'm already not sure how I'll stay motivated to learn Kotlin too, and rebuild the whole app again.

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

#558

Post by oofbey »

hectdev wrote: post #482

As an iOS Engineer that has been fighting the battle against every C-level type who brings up the subject of a shared codebase my whole career, I feel very validated.

If only LLMs had been invented at the beginning of your career, you would have been right all along!

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

#559

Post by busymom0 »

I develop iOS and Android apps and all the apps I have in App/Play Store are native. I did try React Native a few years ago but I just didn’t like how much extra bloat I had to include as third party dependencies.

Plus now with iPhone Duo which has so much variation in layout, I don’t think React Native would work well for it.

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

#560

Post by busymom0 »

hectdev wrote: post #482

As an iOS Engineer that has been fighting the battle against every C-level type who brings up the subject of a shared codebase my whole career, I feel very validated.

Same here. Glad I stuck with native iOS development. I still haven’t switched to SwiftUI though (except for some small stuff). Still sticking with UIKit here.
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