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Posted by fnthawar2 1 day ago

Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin(shopify.engineering)
1175 points | 866 commentspage 10
giebisch 1 day ago|
Their reasoning makes sense. I'd love to read a follow-up and their thoughts in half a year.
StrLght 1 day ago|
If you expect a story about how this migration to native went from technical PoV, they've already shared this: https://shopify.engineering/shop-app-migration

It sounds pretty solid, so I wouldn't expect anything to change in just 6 months.

rramon 1 day ago||
Missing out on flawless App Intents integration could be business risk for Shopify once people get used to doing everything from a central chat interface, including shopping. I guess it's the real reason for the switch.
bsaul 6 hours ago||
is there still no way to compile / execute ios apps on a linux machine ?
gargs 23 hours ago||
What I want to know is if the agents are so good that they can convert React Native code to native with amazing efficiencies along the way, what's stopping them from improving React Native itself?
bakugo 23 hours ago|
Translating code from one language/framework to another is easy for AI to do, as it does not involve solving any novel problems. Making improvements to existing complex codebases is much harder.
running101 1 day ago||
I suspected we would start seeing these types of blog posts. Code is becoming low level, where people do not care what language, it is written in anymore. The cost of moving from one to another is becoming low.
robofanatic 23 hours ago||
this motivates me to rewrite my Flutter app in Swift. I gave up on deploying the app to Android because of their 20 testers requirement at that time (not sure if its still true).
quotemstr 1 day ago||
The wheel of fashion turns once more.
jmknoll 1 day ago||
I don't think its purely fashion here. React Native always incurred a bit of a performance & UX penalty, but many people decided that this tradeoff was worth it for the increase in product development velocity.

LLMs change the tradeoff and organizations would be remiss to not reconsider previous decisions.

nacozarina 1 day ago|||
got me spinning like a record baby
hermitwriter 1 day ago||
srsly
simonhamp 22 hours ago||
As the builder of a post-AI, cross-platform native app building framework like React Native, I 100% believe this to be a backwards move.

I've written up a load of thoughts about that here[1], but in summary for the Shopify case, they're basically going to be spending a ton more than they have to by switching back to multiple apps and I'd predict another swing back to better cross-platform tooling in the coming years.

[1]: https://nativephp.com/blog/why-not-write-it-twice

IshKebab 21 hours ago|
> they're basically going to be spending a ton more than they have to by switching back to multiple apps

A ton more what? Money? AI costs are insignificant to a company like Spotify. Hell I've been using Astra fairly extensively at work and I've only racked up like $500 in the last month. Peanuts.

simonhamp 21 hours ago||
More code means more people. That's not peanuts
IshKebab 20 hours ago||
The whole point of this article is that it doesn't. Or at least for the same number of people you can now have way more code.
simonhamp 12 hours ago||
Is more code the right goal?
IshKebab 3 hours ago||
No. The point is that the goal (slick native apps) isn't blocked by the fact that it needs more code.
simonhamp 1 hour ago||
But if you could get slick native mobile apps with less code (i.e. higher quality abstractions), that would be better
tower-shield 22 hours ago||
Finally some common sense. Time to put electron to rest.
1saadcodes 1 day ago|
What I find interesting is how AI has changed the cost of maintaining two native apps enough that a decision that made no sense a few years ago is worth revisiting now
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