I'm an user; I have zero or near zero development and programming knowledge, so this take of mine might be complete nonsense.

But I think this is perhaps one of the first AI developments I actually like. Transitioning an app from React Native or any web technology to native code has the distinct advantage that the native version should be much more economical in its use of resources.

I'm tired of hearing about RAM and other components hiking their prices while at the same time RAM sizes of ~8 GB are considered too small because things like Electron apps are wasteful in their consumption of resources. Now, with more native apps, we might get full circle: leaner apps thanks to agentic development. Maybe someday 8 GB of RAM could be considered enough once again. Truly interesting.

The one topic that is almost not addressed in this post is: what happens to the React Native developer team?

Technologies are never the issue. The people is.

And they still has zero job openings for Android/iOS devs

An Android developer since 2010 here.

I've always been wary of React Native, because my impression is that it hides nuances of the underlying framework. You may be fine implementing 90% of your app but then need that last 10% and may get stuck.

But then I'm also wary of the recent trend by Google to create higher level frameworks on top of native Android APIs. It seems that these days for every Android API family, there is a Google framework that gives you a higher level API. I don't really understand it - is Google admitting that the quality of native Android APIs has eroded? Do they think developers are too inexperienced to deal with native Android APIs?

I'm also not sure I understand the how reasonably large companies consider two native apps to be too expensive. A startup may have a hard time funding both and may need to choose, but an established business should consider not only costs but also the better quality of user experience that native apps provide - that has to count for something.

React Native is slow.

Hermes VM doesn't even have JIT.

If the majority of your app is native code and only a few places are stitched together via JS code that runs in the Hermes VM, then React Native is suitable for you.

Look at V8 vs. Hermes performance.

We use Flutter; we rarely need to write native code. We have three apps: Symbiote workout app, CalorieCodex, an AI calorie tracker app, and MacroCodex with 17,000+ users, all of them completely free

I forsook RN years ago. I am not a huge fan of the JavaScript ecosystem in the first place, and the UX of RN apps is not the best. Instead, I adopted Kotlin Multiplatform (shortly after their memory management overhaul). I haven't been disappointed. As coding agents have come along, they are really good at writing both Swift and Kotlin, and I get to write all the business logic once. UI can either be shared with CMP, which is quite good, or platform-specific.

I made this argument at my previous company a year ago and was shouted down by most of the mobile engineers. I have since departed, but knowing how much Shopify's engineering blog is worshipped there they will now say this is the future.

Native is the new React?! I could never drink the React Native cool aid due to background in performance optimization. Agents gave us the way to go native with less effort. Compilation is a good feedback loop for the agentic workflow as well.

This thread is very depressing. Web dev bootcamps and product managers have done untold damage to the field of software engineering. And it's our own faults. We had it so good for so long. There was a period of time when programmers were the new "rockstars" (for better or worse). We should have used that respect and those resources to unionise and build some kind of institution responsible for teaching, mentoring, standards, etc - a software engineering guild of some sorts.

Quality is, was and always will be job one. There's obviously a place for AI tools (providing the economy doesn't melt), but can we please just slow down for a second and think about what we're actually doing?

They don't say anything in the post. But hotwire native supports pushing ui elements to ios and android. I imagine that might be part of the reason. I haven't built anything substantial with hotwire native though so I am not sure on all of the edge cases.