Shopify moves back to Native from React Native
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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.
We decided to go all-in on React Native back in 2020, and that bet has been extremely successful. We saved a ton of time building features just once, enabled developers with no mobile background to contribute to our apps, and freed ourselves from constantly chasing feature parity.
In January 2025, I wrote that the future of React Native was bright and that Shopify planned to keep investing in it. That was true based on what we knew then. React Native was working well for us, and it remains an excellent framework. But since then, coding models have gotten dramatically better, and for our apps and our team, building the same feature in Swift and Kotlin no longer carries the cost it used to.
We don’t hold on to a decision just because it was successful at the time. When a core assumption changes, we’re willing to go back and ask whether it’s still the right call. LLMs changed one of the core assumptions behind our 2020 decision, so we reevaluated our mobile stack from first principles.
We decided to switch from native to React Native in 2020 for three reasons:
React Native consistently delivered these benefits. We found ourselves spending a significant amount of time and resources on optimizing performance, improving key foundational areas in React Native, and keeping up with framework updates and external dependencies, but these were acceptable tradeoffs. The benefits of using React Native far outweighed the investments we had to make in these areas.