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Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

shopify.engineering

831–840 of 962 posts

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

#831
post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh the memories. Took them forever to introduce something as simple as tabs that virtually all other competitors had since years.

File explorer was the same, only recently it got tabs.

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

#832
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…

I thought the same, but then I build a few complicated apps and thought I could keep the different codebases stable but still was a headache, so switched web, ios, android all back to expo/rn. I love that testing is only (almost) only thing now, instead of 3 platforms.

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

#833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shopify is not far behind Amazon (the e-com business). It's network sees as many unique visitors as Amazon, though I imagine Amazon has more sessions per visitor, but the GMV across Shopify is just shy of half of Amazon. It's still in the same ball park.

What metic are you using? Shopify takes an average of ~$1bn at checkout daily while Amazon is over 2bn.

Yes, Shopify GMV is roughly half of Amazon.

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

#834
post #204

Earlier 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…

> It's a fine project to do but clearly they put zero value on being familiar with the project's codebase/stack and ecosystem, As much as I dislike it, I think that's the future of _all_ non-critical software (think social media, crms, CI, food delivery etc). Leadership in many companies is explicitly asking employees to have multiple agents running through the day and that will lead to this. Read this for example: h…

I read the article and couldn't understand it. I asked Gemini; Pareto things definitely sounds like science.

I read the article again:

- We had bugs. We let agents try to fix the bugs. True positive (fixed bug) is the F1 score. Here are the results for different models. Fixes worked 50% of the time.

- We needed to find a query. Without a knowledge graph it took 20mins, and didn't work. We used a knowledge graph. It was fast (20s), and found the right thing.

I gave my LLM my summary of the article and apparently I "hit the nail on the head".

I have no clue if I learned anything.

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

#835
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]…

Every company that is not Google lets you have code on your laptop. This is only an annoying thing that they came up with.

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

#837
post #771

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…

I never understood how that flies by Apple's review. Aren't all code changes supposed to go through their review and thus OTA is effectively illegal?

Power on pluggable bundles. So you can change the business logic, but if you want to change any native dependency then you do need a new app binary which needs the same app store review process.

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

#838

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 Chrome 1.0 came out in 2008, it only ran on Windows, and it couldn't do basic things like print or export to PDF, didn't have any accessibility, didn't work in RTL languages, and didn't have any graphics acceleration, among other limitations. Don't get me wrong, it was a marvelous piece of engineering - but it was extremely incomplete. By the time it was what we think of as a modern, complete browser, they had m…

I agree with what you're saying that it's not exactly what we're seeing which makes it not as simple.

However, I've seen this play out in many a big companies where there's a big mess going on. Answer is always similar pointing to -> "clearly it's not simple" and that's kind of the whole point. They made it not simple. 3k ENGINEERS, my sweet dude. THREE THOUSAND. By any and all account that's half as much as current chrome team or in total if you account for open source contributors as well. If robot is to believed that's also a headcount of windows and macos core teams. What is even going on, I don't even..

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

#839
post #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 kil…

I think the Duo support is not there, it will be there at the end of the year.

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

#840

How long until LLMs just write machine code?

IMO it doesn't make sense for LLMs to write machine code, because abstraction allows them to have more information density. As context size is a big limitation right now, cluttering it with less dense information seems like a bad idea.
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