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Shopify returns to Swift and Kotlin as coding agents cut the cost of two mobile codebases

Shopify returns to Swift and Kotlin as coding agents cut the cost of two mobile codebases

  • Shopify is moving its mobile apps from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin after prototypes found coding agents could implement one platform from the other platform's version and help engineers work outside their usual stack.
  • Shopify says agents now handle enough implementation, translation, testing, and review work that maintaining two native apps is no longer the deciding cost it was when the company adopted React Native in 2020.
  • The company still calls React Native effective and says its apps are fast, but prefers native access to platform capabilities and first-party tooling with fewer framework and dependency layers.
  • Shopify will sponsor React Native Skia through the end of 2026 before William Candillon forks and renames it; the original repository will then be archived.
  • FlashList gets about 2 million downloads per week, and Shopify will fix critical compatibility issues while seeking a long-term steward; Restyle will be archived and maintained only through the end of 2026.

Hacker News opinions

I expect a lot of large organizations to revisit cross-platform mobile stacks over the next year if agents keep lowering the cost of parallel implementations.

I'm curious how much native education engineers still need. Can agents handle the language and platform details, or do architecture decisions still require substantial ramp-up?

I'd like to know whether Shopify shares any iOS and Android core through KMP or Rust, and whether it plans to open-source Helix.

The organizational cost is the real question for me. Two codebases can diverge in small ways that duplicate support work and create different bugs, even if agents make implementation cheaper.

I think large companies will increasingly drop React Native and Flutter for native development.

I disagree that native is universally the destination. If apps need to run well on more than iOS and Android, an intermediate representation that compiles to native code is more flexible than binding everything to SwiftUI or a single platform model.

This seems plausible for well-capitalized companies, but not every business. Shopify has had hundreds of engineers on its React Native apps and can spend heavily on tokens; a resource-constrained team may still prefer one codebase, especially for apps that are mostly webviews.

React Native has always imposed some performance and UX cost, and teams accepted that for faster product work. If LLMs change the development-speed tradeoff, reconsidering native is rational rather than a fashion cycle.

In React Native, I often end up writing native code for anything interesting or performance-sensitive anyway. At some point it makes sense to work directly with the platforms.

I worry more about the React Native ecosystem. Losing Shopify's stewardship of Skia and potentially FlashList is a significant loss, even if another maintainer takes over.

I would like a follow-up after this has been running in production for a while. Shopify has already described a migration of a simpler app and says it is using Helix for the main app, so the technical approach is more concrete than this post alone suggests.

The post has not shown that long-term parity is cheaper. Agents can generate two matching implementations today, but divergence accumulates over years through experiments, analytics, accessibility, edge cases, bug fixes, and platform behavior.

Shared specifications, tests, and review checkpoints are the load-bearing claim here. I want numbers on the cost reduction and evidence that the process survives real customer use over time.

I'm also curious about the token spend. Running agents across two native codebases may move costs rather than eliminate them.

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