Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

In January 2025, Shopify's CEO believed that React Native's future was promising and that the company planned to continue investing in it. React Native had been a successful choice for building mobile apps for the company since 2020, offering several benefits such as shared codebase, reduced development time, and enabling non-mobile developers to contribute. However, as coding models improved, Shopify reevaluated its mobile tech stack and questioned if building software in Swift and Kotlin could provide better results.

LLMs (large language models) had become a critical part of Shopify's software development process since 2021, helping to write code, investigate bugs, and review code. By late 2025, these models had advanced to the point where they could question whether building software twice still meant twice the work. Shopify decided to prototype the implementation of their core apps in Swift and Kotlin using LLMs and were pleasantly surprised by the results.

Despite the fact that building software for each platform still carries a cost, LLMs have reduced the advantages of sharing implementation. The advantages of building for each platform remain, as native development enables developers to work closer to platform capabilities and first-party tooling, with fewer framework and dependency layers between code and the platform.

Shopify intends to migrate its apps gradually, starting with the Shop app, which has been rebuilt in native Swift and Kotlin within 12 weeks with the help of AI assistance. The migration of the Shopify app, with over 300 screens, is ongoing and will be released later in the year. Shopify will continue to contribute to React Native and ensure a smooth transition without any surprises.