Shopify Abandons React Native for Native Swift and Kotlin Development
Shopify is migrating its mobile applications to native Swift and Kotlin, citing AI-assisted coding as a way to offset the historical maintenance costs of managing separate codebases.
Shopify is moving its mobile applications away from React Native to native Swift and Kotlin development. The company rebuilt its Shop application this way, going from a proof of concept to a fully deployed native app in 12 weeks.
Six years ago, Shopify committed to a cross-platform strategy. According to Mustafa Ali, director of engineering at Shopify, advancements in large language models changed mobile development economics. Because models now assist in porting implementations between iOS and Android, maintaining a single cross-platform codebase to save time is no longer necessary. The cost of building and maintaining two separate codebases is no longer the primary constraint it was in 2020.
Returning to Swift and Kotlin removes React Native abstraction layers. While the cross-platform framework previously allowed Shopify to avoid duplicate efforts, it required ongoing overhead for performance optimizations, framework updates, and external dependencies. Native languages give the engineering team direct access to platform-specific APIs.
Historically, Shopify relied on React Native to expose the latest functionality from iOS and Android before integrating those updates. Native development eliminates this dependency, letting the company implement platform features immediately upon their release by Apple or Google. Shopify plans to move its remaining mobile applications, including the Shopify merchant app, to native code.