Live data from Hacker News

Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

shopify.engineering

761–770 of 962 posts

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

#761

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…

Tidal is pretty nice to use. Plus the music isn't compressed.

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

#762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that letting the LLM produce more output means that maintenance will be more expensive? I can easily see a world where claude and gpt are producing more tokens to sell you more tokens.

The models will only get better and inference cost will go down. I don’t see any reason to think the same thing that happens with all tech won’t happen here.

Enshittification and profit maximalization is around the corner looking for you.

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

#764

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…

When business is booming, you can do nothing wrong, as with that revenue even big mistakes stop mattering.

All I want from Spotify is API so someone can make better player/plugin to a better player.

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

#765
post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rubbish. Most of the stuff you’re listing is handled by OS and frameworks themselves, you don’t need hundreds of SE to handle RTL or a11y. I work in one of those companies, most people just regurgitate existing shit into another form of shit and collect salary (not complaining, as I’m one of them, but let’s be honest).

The original Edge had to switch over to Chromium because it was hard to build a compliant accessible browser from scratch and this is Microsoft we are talking about.

The didn't had to, MS Browser team was incompetent from the beginning of internet

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

#766
post #746

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…

Sometimes I wonder what the tech ecosystem would look like without the ZIRP era. I look back over 15 years and with the exception of increased smart phone usage, everything else still looks mostly familiar. Maybe a bit more slick, but also slower and buggier despite having much better hardware. There hasn't been a qualitative leap in software (as was in the 90s). Just larger SaaS companies. Without ZIRP would it have…

That and venture investment has become bane of good.

When a company can run for years, hell, decade+ on the red thanks to investments, that means every competitor now have to compete with company that sells their goods or services below production value. It just kills competition and innovation, which only becomes possible if other company also attracts investors

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

#767

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 nati…

> The performance gains in native compared to RN (new architecture) are minimal for normal UIs (except games)

And yet most apps feels distinctly different than native.

> 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

That's the real killer feature

> Silos of bugs on native - When you go native you might encounter bugs which appear only on either platform.

This still very much happens with RN on anything bigger than a toy app

> 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.

Speaking of which, what is the iPhone Duo support situation of RN right now?

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

#768
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…

Congratulations, you now have 2 codebases to maintain.

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

#769

And so the mobile app development wheel turns. All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.

If the argument, which seems to be "code is cheap; let's write implementations for multiple platforms", remains true, what do you think will continue turning the wheel?

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

#770

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.

Shoplifty
Post reply on HN