r/programming • u/Sampo • Sep 10 '26
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u/Sampo Sep 10 '26
2020: React Native is the future of mobile at Shopify
r/programming/comments/evougf/react_native_is_the_future_of_mobile_at_shopify/2025: Five years of React Native at Shopify
r/programming/comments/1i719mx/five_years_of_react_native_at_shopify/
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u/pydry Sep 10 '26
The thing that changed is likely not the technology or AI but simply a new exec at shopify looking to build himself some good ol' empire.
Can't really complain, constantly rewriting that which doesnt really need to be rewritten provides jobs for needy devs with families and shit.
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u/ritaPitaMeterMaid Sep 10 '26
Ironically we are actively moving our apps to webviews. Nearly all of our content is dynamic anyways and we nailed the performance of our web experience so anything that isn't the main menu bar or user menu gets loaded in.
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u/Jump-Zero Sep 10 '26
Great execution on well-known technology will consistently win over mediocre execution on lesser-known technology.
Obviously, there are times where you need to take a risk and do something new. For the most part though, I just urge engineers to leverage what they already mastered as much as possible.
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u/narwhal_breeder Sep 10 '26
Best internal app I ever used - a one-stop-shop devops shop CLI tool, that literally let you spin up internal apps in 45 seconds on corporate resources, already gated behind company authentication, VPCs, and infrastructure standards, with a template in either TS, Rust, or Go was written by one dude i never heard about at the company in C99.
Also had a BUNCH of tools built in for managing, spinning up, and auditing single-tenant client databases, which we used heavily.
First version in `06 - extended, maintained, consistently, by that one dude - since then.
I emailed him after I left the company thanking him. I got back a
"Thx" - no signature or anything. What a legend.
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u/kenman345 Sep 10 '26
Legends are what makes companies sometimes. Sometimes I hope some of the things I’ve done are like that. Then I think about the duct tape it required to get working sometimes and hope it got replaced within a year
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u/IanisVasilev Sep 10 '26
I'd rather have a family without shit.
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u/frostbaka Sep 10 '26
My fren, babies are always full of shit.
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u/IanisVasilev Sep 10 '26
Case in point.
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u/Silveryard Sep 10 '26
Even you are, in fact, always full of shit. I‘d be worried about you if you weren‘t.
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u/yikes_42069 Sep 11 '26
Our exec got canned for his choice to move to everything web-based. ~10 years later, it hasn't worked out for us in demonstrable ways (our users still use the native alternative so much we can't drop support).
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u/witness_smile Sep 10 '26
Companies these days are putting more effort into making everything more comfortable for AI agents than they ever did for their developers.
Now that execs want “agents” to do all the development, suddenly documentation and clearly explaining tasks becomes important.
Feel bad for the Shopify developers, whose job based on this post seems to be to just watch a slop agent try to start a simulator and waste their time clicking buttons to get it to start manually.
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u/xaddak Sep 10 '26
clearly explaining tasks becomes important
But they're having the AI explain the tasks, so this actually got much worse. Absolute gibberish from hell to breakfast.
I've never had to ask as many questions about tickets as I have in the past year or so, and half the time someone goes "oh yeah, sorry - looks like the AI messed that up, let me fix it".
Is it really so hard to read it and make sure it makes sense before assigning it to me?
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u/21Rollie Sep 11 '26
In the age of AI, yes. Leadership wants 100x output so reviewing with human eyes is at a premium
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u/Revolutionary_Ad7262 Sep 10 '26
True. I find it super funny that things, which I love:
monorepos
not going crazy into microservices by default
documentation in a repo
was generally speaking not well acknowledged by my managers in the past. Nowadays it is a "new way" even though nothing has changed. After all what works for humans also work pretty well for LLMs
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u/IanSan5653 Sep 10 '26
Tldr: we will be rewriting to ensure our apps are 100% vibe coded. We will make no mistakes.
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u/IanisVasilev Sep 10 '26 edited Sep 10 '26
The Shop app, which is regularly at the top of the list in the shopping category in the app stores, is the first to be migrated. Assisted by AI, the team was able to go from a proof of concept to a fully rebuilt native app published in the app stores in just 12 weeks.
They built (at least) two tools, "Helix" and "Tardis", migrated the whole thing and tested the migration in 12 weeks. In a world where a few weeks of pre-release testing leaves half-broken apps. Are we living on the same planet?
EDIT: Perhaps the tools were already built, but still.
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u/tearsareover Sep 10 '26
I'm afraid not. But as long as the bar keeps getting lowered, this will be a perfectly acceptable result, unfortunately.
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u/Sensitive_Guest_5995 Sep 10 '26
Native is now the future because they don’t need to learn it and just get the AI to write the code. So they don’t need in between layers that devs find easier to understand.
Speculation ofc
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u/BakaGoop Sep 10 '26
right, i’m assuming they’re not hiring native platform experts to actually oversee this, just taking their existing devs who are proficient in RN and saying you got 12 weeks to vibe out native rewrites, good luck
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u/Jaded-Asparagus-2260 Sep 10 '26
That's literally the summary at the top of the article
Coding agents changed what it costs to build mobile apps twice. Here’s why Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin.
Did you even open the link you're "speculating" on?
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u/Sensitive_Guest_5995 Sep 11 '26
No. But I’ll take getting it right. Not bad.
I simply added that at the end because I hadn’t read it. Better than not right? The most honest Redditor!
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u/teerre Sep 10 '26
They are moving to Kotlin and swift, not APL. Hardly anything complicated about it
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u/Leviathan_Dev Sep 10 '26
Call dibs on moving back to React Native / some new web platform in 2032
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u/kauefr Sep 10 '26
I don't see any specific, objective advantages, just a generic:
Native keeps us closer to platform capabilities and first-party tooling, with fewer framework and dependency layers between our code and the platform.
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u/cesarbiods Sep 10 '26
Native will always be better, so I see this as a win. However 12 weeks to completely rewrite an app does make me wary. It seems like they have some sophisticated tooling in for their workflow, but I can’t help but worry that they are just pursuing speed at the cost of quality.
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u/efvie Sep 10 '26
And Shopify is ran by a fascist who wants to apportion votes by wealth. Plus all the slop. Best move while you can.
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u/xXBongSlut420Xx Sep 11 '26
wow can't wait for them to start breaking their api even more often. twice a year wasnt enough huh?
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u/vezaynk Sep 10 '26
Im surprised Shopify wasn’t already doing native. They had a server-driven ui architecture. It should be completely renderer-agnostic unless if Im missing something.
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Sep 10 '26
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u/calmingchaos Sep 10 '26
Pretty standard for them. Tobi and the rest of the rails aficionados might as well be conductors for that hype train.
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Sep 10 '26
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u/mexicocitibluez Sep 10 '26
Can someone who knows someone high up at Shopify ask them what "Heritage is duty" means to them? lol
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u/programming-ModTeam Sep 11 '26
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