Shopify Ditches React Native, Moves Shop App to Kotlin & Swift

Shopify, the e-commerce giant, announced it migrated its mobile app, Shop, from React Native to Swift and Kotlin. 

With AI assistance, the company said it took a proof of concept to a rebuilt native app published in the App Store in just 12 weeks. 

This reverses the company’s 2020 decision to move to React Native. “That decision has served the Shop app well, but our increasing ability to develop with coding agents has allowed Shop to go fully native, building with Swift and Kotlin,” said the company. 

Shopify said that advances in coding agents changed the tradeoffs behind maintaining a shared mobile codebase. Using Swift and Kotlin means that the company needs to build separately for iOS and Android, “but agents made it reasonable to reconsider that decision”, said the company. 

Agents can now handle enough implementation, translation, testing and review work that the duplication is no longer the deciding factor it once was.

With this new native architecture, Shopify said that startup time for the Shop app was reduced by 23% for iOS and 50% on Android. 

Session stability rose from more than 99.5% to more than 99.95%, which Shopify described as a tenfold reduction in crashing sessions. The Android release build also shrank by 109 MB, or 37.2%, while iOS app size increased by 1 MB.

Shopify said the migration preserved sign-in sessions, push notifications and analytics events required by downstream systems. It also retired some screens and streamlined others.

The company is using a workflow called Helix to migrate its wider app portfolio. Helix breaks screens into reviewable checkpoints, requiring tests, visual comparisons, adversarial code reviews and human approval before implementation proceeds. 

Shopify is also developing a command-line interface that lets agents inspect app state and execute actions without relying on slow simulator interactions.

The Shopify app, which has more than 300 screens and includes widgets, an Apple Watch app and Siri Shortcuts, is now being migrated and is expected to ship later this year. Shopify said its other mobile apps will follow.

Shopify will continue sponsoring React Native Skia through the end of 2026, while FlashList will receive critical compatibility fixes as the company discusses long-term stewardship. Restyle will be archived after the end of 2026.

However, the reaction to Shopify’s decision has focused on whether coding agents have changed React Native's engineering trade-offs, or simply made it cheaper to move away from the framework.

One software developer wrote on X that Shopify’s explanation was “very thin on the reasoning as to why”, arguing that the post focused on LLMs making native development easier without identifying a specific React Native limitation that had prompted the migration.

The decision, he suggested, appeared to be motivated primarily by reducing abstraction.

Jamon Holmgren, CEO of React Native consultancy Infinite Red, added some context on X about the performance comparison. 

He noted that the Shop app had not yet migrated to React Native’s New Architecture, which was developed in part to address startup-time issues.

“The one thing that was almost certain to improve startup time hadn’t happened yet,” Holmgren said, questioning how much of the reported performance improvement could be attributed to moving away from React Native rather than completing that transition.

Alex Mikucki, a software developer, wrote on X that Shopify’s rapid rewrite was unsurprising, arguing that declarative UI frameworks such as SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose are similar enough for agents to migrate between them effectively. 

His experience rebuilding Expo Go’s UI in Jetpack Compose reinforced that view.

The harder challenge, he said, is maintaining consistent business logic and behaviour across separate native codebases. 

Agents cannot necessarily resolve the trade-off between cross-platform consistency and platform-specific feel.

“I don't think react-native will go away, but I definitely feel react-native is evolving, will evolve further.” 

He predicted more native components for performance-sensitive interfaces, greater use of over-the-air updates, and architectures that combine native and JavaScript components.

“I don't think the falling cost of writing lower level code makes abstractions automatically obsolete,” he wrote. “You get for free a lot of community effort on deciding/mapping platform quirks, stuff that would cost tokens and engineering effort otherwise, or even worse, would be missed and be a long-running paper-cut in your app.”