Shopify Drops React Native for Swift and Kotlin as AI Changes Cross-Platform Development Tradeoffs

Shopify has decided to abandon React Native in favor of developing its flagship apps using Swift and Kotlin. The e-commerce giant recognized that the cost-benefit ratio of maintaining native codebases on multiple platforms has shifted due to advancements made in AI technology. The decision follows Shopify's 2020 prediction that React Native would be the future of its mobile architecture, which they reaffirmed in 2025 after successfully migrating all apps over a five-year period.

Initially, React Native offered benefits such as reduced duplicate feature development, talent portability, and increased focus on delivering value to users rather than chasing feature parity. Shopify's impressive results with React Native included blazing-fast screen loads (500ms) and high stability (99.9% crash-free sessions).

However, the company acknowledged that native development remained critical for leveraging device hardware features and handling memory limitations. After a year of reassessment, Shopify concluded that adopting React Native's New Architecture would have required extensive native module integrations, rendering, and code boundary adjustments, making a clean-slate rewrite more appealing.

Furthermore, the rapid improvement in AI coding models and agents led to a successful proof-of-concept where a single engineer created the Shop app in a week, which was then reconstructed by six engineers over 12 weeks. This greenfield rewrite provided better results compared to the proposed migration. The switch to native platforms has yielded improvements such as reduced cold startup latency (23% on iOS, 50% on Android), increased session stability (99.5% to 99.95%), and faster release build times on Android.

Shopify's developers are encouraged to explore in-depth articles on the subject. However, the performance and productivity improvements are measured against the old React Native architecture, not the new one. Additionally, over-the-air updates in full Native development may require going through the app review process, which can slow down release frequencies.

Some developers argue that the shift towards native development is influenced by a preference for quick changes without extensive review, coming from a web development background. Conversely, native development often requires thorough testing and careful planning due to the heavier impact of each release, resulting in more stable updates released every few weeks.

Ultimately, Shopify believes both approaches have their merits, and the company aims to finish its Point of Sale and Inbox apps within the year, with the multi-screen Shopify app, including features like home & lockscreen widgets, Apple Watch app, and Siri Shortcuts, scheduled for completion this year.