Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify
Shopify is dropping React Native for separate Swift and Kotlin native apps, saying AI agents now handle cross-platform implementation work.
Shopify adopted React Native in 2020 to stop building features twice, let developers work across the stack, and spend less time chasing feature parity. The company now plans to return to separate Swift and Kotlin codebases. Simon Willison's commentary notes AI agents can do enough implementation, translation, testing, and review work that dual native codebases are viable again.
- Move reverses a 2020 decision made for cost and parity reasons
- AI agent capability is cited as the deciding factor
- Native maintenance costs remain, but agents absorb much of the overhead
- Vendors
- Shopify
- Products
- React NativeSwiftKotlin
- Organizations
- Shopify
From the original article
Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify Shopify are moving from React Native back to separate Swift and Kotlin codebases for their native apps, for the exact reason you would expect: We decided to switch from native to React Native in 2020 for three reasons: Stop building the same features twice Allow developers to work across the stack Spend less time chasing feature parity and more time shipping value [...]
simonwillison.net
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.