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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

#981

Post by klrefg »

hypendev wrote: post #785
dmazzoni wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And, importantly, this was 2008. Most of the modern software tooling you have today wasn't available back then, from great IDE's to popular libraries, writing software in 2008 was a different beast compared to today.

Wasn’t Chrome mostly a wrapper on Webkit, though? You had to add the engineers who worked on Safari and KHTML before to the count..

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

#982

Post by klrefg »

NavekG wrote: post #731
wiseowise wrote: post #692

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.

> build a compliant accessible browser from scratch

Which is not something even Google ever succeeded. They had a significant head start due to Webkit being open source.

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

#983

Post by owebmaster »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #346
RetpolineDrama wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Flutter has been dead-end for a while. RN won't last through 2027.

LOL, flutter/dart are pretty awesome and we have yet to encounter something that needed improvement. We have small shims for IOS or Android BLE. But otherwise the discussion of should you go native is really a discussion of how many employees do you have to throw with this?

Flutter is pretty abandoned. If it's "awesome" for you still, it won't be for too long.

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

#984

Post by sgammon »

UK-Al05 wrote: post #759
sgammon wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are selling the code as the product, it could be said to be an “actual” software product, rather than a mechanism for selling other products, or software as a substrate for some other business. Those other businesses aren’t any less valid, of course. They just aren’t software businesses. They are businesses that (quite sensibly) use software.

Shopify is literally selling software.

That’s right, they are. I don’t think I said they weren’t.

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

#985

Post by dbbk »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #598

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…

"A simple app" well there's your first mistake, it's not a simple app is it

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

#986

Post by jakubmazanec »

meowface wrote: post #760
sashank_1509 wrote: post #598

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.

Did they finally implemented Last.fm integration and sleep timer?

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

#987

Post by sgammon »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #873
sgammon wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in a time now where libraries are free and plentiful and pretty good. It is easy to forget that this was not the case for the vast majority of time that computers have existed. Chrome’s original design definitely predates our current rich ecosystem. Plus, V8 and Chrome’s performance profile are demanding enough that there would be a pretty high bar for those dependencies anyway.

> We live in a time now where libraries are free and plentiful and pretty good. Specifically what are you talking about here? Chrome is c++ I thought?

Chrome was invented in 2008. Abseil[1] didn't exist publicly until 2017, derived partly from Chromium.

HarfBuzz wasn't ported to C++ until 2010. I don't know the entire constellation of libs Chrome would use if it was designed in C++ today, but I bet a lot of them didn't exist before Chrome or were even created partly as a downstream byproduct of Chromium.

In other ecosystems: if Chrome were designed in Rust in 2008, there would be no crates.io to pull from. There would be no NPM, since Node followed V8/Chrome's invention in 2009. Maven Central had ~50K packages in 2009[2], which was a lot back then. In 2026, Maven Central hosts over 3 million.

[1]: https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp

[2]: https://mvnrepository.com/repos/central

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

#988

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

yes1would wrote: post #977
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #948

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So literally not Nazis… but you have been programmed to go to extremes in any political disagreement. I suspect they are both better informed and likely better members of society than you giving evidence of.

Did you read the article? Or like, even google it? Because yes, they are 100% literally Nazis.

Did I read some loser’s blog about how some not-Nazis are totally-Nazis?

Nah, miss me with that clownshoes moron shit.

Grow up and join the real world anytime.

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

#989

Post by yes1would »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #988
yes1would wrote: post #977

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? Or like, even google it? Because yes, they are 100% literally Nazis.

Did I read some loser’s blog about how some not-Nazis are totally-Nazis? Nah, miss me with that clownshoes moron shit. Grow up and join the real world anytime.

Cool story Nazi sympathizer. Go visit Nuremberg.

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

#990

Post by Melatonic »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #598

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…

3000 engineers or 3000 people on the engineering side of the org ?

Not sure I'd trust Astra in its numbers.

Shopify also seems to be very solid and reliable and I imagine that could require a lot of QA and edge cases (and a lot of support engineers)

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