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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

#721

Post by Vegenoid »

vantassell wrote: post #612
Vegenoid wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify has progressively gotten much worse over the last 15 years, all while the size of their engineering team has ballooned. I am very unsurprised by this outcome. People wonder why good software becomes bad, and it’s because the people who were good at engineering are often outmaneuvered by corporate-politics savvy people in a growing company. One of the best political moves in a company is to have a lot of peopl…

>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.

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

#722

Post by bigiain »

fallingbananna wrote: post #710
dominus103 wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who has not run software at scale have no idea what it takes to run it at scale. Google chrome is 60 engineers at launch but google same company has more than 100k engineers. Building first version was always easy and only gotten easy, scaling software was always hard and it is still hard. PS - Spotify i can't defend the product sucks.

I wonder how many of the 100k+ enginners at Google work on that "simple" text box that shows you relevant websites to the input text.

I'm guessing that maybe 4 of them maintain that in their "20% time", while the 99,996 other engineers are:

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." -Jeff Hammerbacher

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

#723

Post by harrouet »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #703
keithcarolus wrote: post #637

That Shopify employs 3,000 engineers is astounding. I was rejected after a fairly basic ML interview at Shopify and when I asked for feedback I was told someday I could become a machine learning engineer. I don’t think the interviewer read my resume or understood my responses as this was after working for several years in ML roles - staff applied ML and scientist. So maybe that tells you something.

Why is it astounding? They have one of the biggest e-commerce applications in the world. A mobile app for shoppers. A payment system and mobile wallet app. A shipment tracking system. Tax and small business software. They have their own lending arm with its own software. They have multiple frameworks for other development teams to make super customizable e-commerce sites. They support Remix and Tailwind among other s…

Plus they have an Amazon-scale infrastructure to manage...

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

#724

Post by user43928 »

nicce wrote: post #270
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

1. Not storing secrets properly or using hardcoded secrets 2. Wild use of webviews/iframes sometimes easily propagates as XSS in phones 3. Incorrect client-side OAuth 2.0 configuration e.g. with schema-based redirect URLs. 4. Not supporting high-enough API versions, which may prevent some OS-related weaknesses 5. The list is actually very long. Just few top of my mind.

Storing private secrets in your public client is easy to avoid for anyone halfway competent. We are all professionals here.

Turn on the secrets scan in GitLab, and put in your release checklist to have the AI audit the usage of secrets in your app, and this is basically guaranteed not to occur.

I doubt current models even make such a mistake in the first place, and particularly so if you use reviews at all.

WebViews are not an inherent problem, it's the system browser embedded in your app.

Where it gets tricky is if your use case involves authentication in the browser. Together with the authentication in your app this is the one area where you need to focus on security.

The case where a SDK update is needed to prevent weaknesses of the OS seems rather unlikely.

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

#725

Post by bogeholm »

Vegenoid wrote: post #721
vantassell wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I’ll subscribe to your Sphoophtify service immediately

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

#727

Post by psychoslave »

bogeholm wrote: post #725
Vegenoid wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’ll subscribe to your Sphoophtify service immediately

Can’t wait for Sphpoophteefy+ premium subscription to be released!

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

#728

Post by smackeyacky »

fingerlocks wrote: post #712
hn993302 wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone always knew native was better if dev cost weren't a factor

Go back in time and read the react-native vs native debates. Many react advocates claimed otherwise

Time and progress have overtaken them. At the time they were likely correct but I certainly wouldn’t bother with react native any more when the LLMs have gotten so good

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

#729

Post by pranshuchittora »

My 2 cents on this as a fellow RN dev & contributor. - The performance gains in native compared to RN (new architecture) are minimal for normal UIs (except games) - The most valuable feature which RN have is OTA updates, this has been a game changer for us and many fast moving companies. Ability to release and iterate at light speed. On native you are on the mercy of the app stores for review. - Silos of bugs on native > When you go native you might encounter bugs which appear only on either platform. - The project management of native teams is not always in sync - The teams often drift apart bevy iOS team might need 2 weeks just to make the app compatible with the new iPhone Fold (Duo) or Android team might encountered a blocker. Keeping them in sync for new features is really hard.

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

#730

Post by psychoslave »

dominus103 wrote: post #681
sashank_1509 wrote: post #599

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…

People who has not run software at scale have no idea what it takes to run it at scale. Google chrome is 60 engineers at launch but google same company has more than 100k engineers. Building first version was always easy and only gotten easy, scaling software was always hard and it is still hard. PS - Spotify i can't defend the product sucks.

It’s not that much about scalling software, as scalling software on highly concentered nodes. Distribution downstream can be its own hell, admittedly, but otherwise having fully independent copy of software copies that run in local terminal is a no-brainer if all that matter is running software at scale.
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