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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

#561

Post by kccqzy »

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #553
kccqzy wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure you can choose not to adopt React’s reactive paradigm and manage state directly but using JavaScript. My understanding was that in RN, JavaScript code manipulates C++ objects in the C++ part of RN, which then calls host platform code to create views and render.

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

#562

Post by uselesswords »

canto wrote: post #351

So, instead of paying humans twice for the same thing, Shopify will pay corporations to burn the planet a little bit more, waste water and energy - to build the same thing twice. Just because. There's no tech reason to do it. "LLMS are better now". There's no low level optimisations, no blockers, no app shortcomings, it's a shopping app for Christ sake. Instead of optimising, creating more with less, they will create…

Can someone explain the waste water thing to me, because unless they’re separating it into H2 and O2 how is it possible for water to be wasted?

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

#563

Post by kashnote »

I mean it sounds nice but they never say _why_. "AI removes a lot of the burden" is not a _why_. I was hoping to read about some of the shortcomings of React Native, but it seems like they're doing it just because they can. I remember Airbnb had a post about switching off of React Native years ago that actually had some solid reasoning behind it.

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

#564

Post by ashishb »

atonse wrote: post #31

We did the same thing - had 90% of it overnight. Then spent a few days in the background tweaking for polish. Our app is smaller, and has about 15-20 screens. I started at about 12:30am by giving codex a goal and it inventoried every screen based on the react native code, then created android and iOS directories, used maestro (I had already set up this tooling for a previous personal app build a few weeks prior), and…

React native is broadly an inferior option.

LLMs made it way worse https://ashishb.net/tech/react-native/

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

#565

Post by SenHeng »

kashnote wrote: post #563

I mean it sounds nice but they never say _why_. "AI removes a lot of the burden" is not a _why_. I was hoping to read about some of the shortcomings of React Native, but it seems like they're doing it just because they can. I remember Airbnb had a post about switching off of React Native years ago that actually had some solid reasoning behind it.

https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-react-nativ...

Article is too long to summarise but basically they outgrew it tech- and org-wise.

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

#566

Post by sebmellen »

azuanrb wrote: post #383
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…

I’ve worked with both native and cross-platform. I think the mentality of being able to make changes quickly without much review often comes from cross-platform, especially when the developers come from a web background. Changes are cheap and fast, so teams often feel less pressure to test everything thoroughly before a release. Which is a fair tradeoff. That’s part of the reason we can have dozens of releases a day…

Totally depends on your business model too. We have clients that often require quick changes for compliance reasons, and they need to ensure all users of our apps are congruently updated. That’s not easy without OTA.

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

#567

Post by sebmellen »

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #552
whstl wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, but to my understanding that’s not what Shopify is doing.

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

#568

Post by hackernud3s »

hectdev wrote: post #506
hackernud3s wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why you would, unless your argument for your whole career has been that LLMs make this easy.

My argument is that platform specific codebases is the right course of action. My point is that consumers can tell, the product is better, and developers are happier working on native codebases.

We'll have to wait and see if the extra maintenance / bugs / attack surface is justified. This an announcement of future direction so vindicated is certainly premature.

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

#569

Post by svieira »

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #552
whstl wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, it could, but then you would have re-invented React Native. But in WASM.

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

#570

Post by majormajor »

user43928 wrote: post #95
fourside wrote: post #67

Earlier 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.

That's a recipe for regressions as the amount of surface you have to cover with "just...use the app" gets bigger and bigger.

You can write more automation to test it. But that's also how you end up with ever-growing test run times.

There are much better ways that aren't just "throw out the LLM" either. You just need to be more focused on throughput. Requiring manual validation can pretty rapidly require more hours than just sanity-checking code by hand, even (and I'm not advocating that for every use case, either.)

I can't afford manual QA passes if I'm gonna go as quickly as I want to.

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