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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

#901

Post by aenis »

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…

We did the same with our apps used by a few hundred thousand people a day. We are a slow, boring company, so the port took about 4 weeks of engineering work, and maybe 3 months taking into account release process and change management. But in fairness, we had the first working version after a day as well. This was in February, too, with substantially less capable models, unable to do overnight runs.

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

#902

Post by aenis »

wccrawford wrote: post #190
greenowl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And people say AI isn't taking SWE jobs...

While I mostly agree with you, this is the kind of thing that might not have been done if the AI couldn't do the heavy lifting. They had previously chosen React Native because it was easier for programmers to keep it updated, since it was really just 1 codebase. With AI, those same programmers can do the more difficult version, keeping the native apps updated separately. So did it kill a job, or did it make it possib…

In case of my company, the port was planned for this year, with a 9 month timeline and about 10 FTE team. It ended up being done in 3 months, with 2 engineers. (Sure, plus testers and internal bureaucracies, but that 2 FTE for 3 months vs. 10 FTE for 9 forecasted is apples-to-apples). Sure its eating up SWE jobs.

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

#903

Post by spiderice »

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.

Could you reinvent OTA updates in another non-native language? Of course. But then you still wouldn't have a native app. You'd just be doing React Native but worse.

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

#904

Post by simonhamp »

IshKebab wrote: post #848
simonhamp wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is more code the right goal?

No. The point is that the goal (slick native apps) isn't blocked by the fact that it needs more code.

But if you could get slick native mobile apps with less code (i.e. higher quality abstractions), that would be better

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

#905

Post by bentcorner »

T4iga wrote: post #737
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 am quite curious about what people hat so much about Spotify. I made some excursions the last few years to competitors like Tidal and Apple Music but I just found myself coming back because the Spotify mobile app experience (and desktop) was just plain better. I wonder what gripes people have.

Spotify works mostly fine for me but there's weird rough edges that I don't always see in "simpler" apps.

Stuff like transitioning between desktop and mobile - it tries to work and most of the time it does, but sometimes I need to manually make my desktop play on my desktop. Not a big deal but sometimes I'd be happier if this feature didn't exist at all.

On my desktop, Spotify can be finicky when I connect/disconnect my bluetooth headphones. Sometimes it refuses to play after I connect my headphones, and I need to restart the app. I think it's trying to do something magically for me after it detects the headphones and gets into a wedged state, but a simpler "play to active speaker, whatever it is" audio app wouldn't have this problem.

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

#906

Post by sunaookami »

zero_shift wrote: post #498
netshade wrote: post #167

I agree w/ advising people to move off React Native, though I think the story that "LLM enabled an otherwise too-expensive migration to consider" is not correct. I say this because I was part of a migration from a mid-size React Native app to a Swift/Kotlin native app redo. I did the majority of the technical work on it. The majority of the work occurred before January 2026 and without LLM code assistance, though lat…

> The continued React Native tax of unnecessarily difficult upgrades, My very first experience of RN was having to update an app to handle the mandatory change to 64 bit APKs Which required a massive update not only to several dependencies but also xcode, iOS frameworks, the weird objective C caches that get smuggled into node_modules, _as well as_ all the rigmarole or making the 64 bit APK build work It was complete…

It's still like this and now they release new versions and breaking changes way faster. Not to mention they nudge you to Expo now and outsourced nearly everything to other (outdated) dependencies and companies. Stay far away from RN if you value your sanity, it lead to my burnout.

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

#907

Post by _the_inflator »

dmazzoni wrote: post #683
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…

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…

DevOps and infrastructure, Security. Internal tools is correct, but speed, video quality as well as sound seems so easy. Google is responsible for many compression algorithms and standards - byproducts so to say. And they are top notch.

I have insights into the matters, and a lot goes into behind the scene optimization. Some specialists in the pre-AI phase were tasked to do nothing else but optimize build tools but in the sense of tweaking every millisecond out of it. This guy saved Google Billions over the years.

Others work in compiler building etc.

There are a couple of hints in the books by Google engineers but I am regularily blown away during meetings what really highly inspiring things are there to discover as well as presented.

Another factor: Google is spread around the globe. Regulation, law. Believe me, having over a billion users per app is mindblowing.

And it is 24/7/365. And support. And research.

Google is a company I admire. Technical provess at its finest.

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

#908

Post by jstummbillig »

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…

In a sane society we would be less willing to pass heavy judgement on so many things at passing glance.

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

#909

Post by abustamam »

austin-cheney wrote: post #803
abustamam wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's an "actual software product" and why don't you think web products count as them? I'm a full stack web developer. I've worked for startups and F500 companies. There is always a push for release targets. The less technical the leadership, the stricter the release targets (its hard to sell a critical refactoring to management when they cant sell a shiny new feature or kpi to their own boss). We've kept our teams…

I worked at Expedia for a bit. Ask yourself if they are a tech company, software company, or travel company. It’s not a trick question. They have a shit ton of software developers that work there. Same with Bank of America where I also worked. In fact BoA has more software developers as employees than almost any other company. Compare those to a company whose only product is software or is primarily a software servic…

I dont see the correlation between company type (tech/software/X company) and sucking at your job though. Ive never worked for a, as you define it, "software" company because the software ive built has always been in service of selling other things, but people who sucked at their jobs got let go quickly.

And there are absolutely software companies that hire sucky people. I don't know for certain if the people who work there are sucky, but the software they build and sell certainly are.

Maybe for big corporation non-tech companies the calculus is different? But both Shopify and Spotify certainly cant exist without their software.

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

#910

Post by 0xpgm »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #891
0xpgm wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Things have become measurably worse as open standards have been dropped. An example is messaging apps. Today, if I want to remain in touch with my friends and family I have to juggle between Facebook messenger (thank the heavens for this app which means I rarely need to open Facebook itself), Whatsapp, Signal, etc. In the early 2000s, even though I was on more services, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, AIM, a single app such as tril…

> Even better, discovery was through human recommendations rather than algorithms designed to keep you hooked on the platform.

Yeah, that's one thing that is definitely noticeable. Online social services basically became data-driven psychology research companies, with the goal being to improve engagement. Every page refresh became an A/B test designed to keep you hooked.

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