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👋 Hi, this is Gergely with a subscriber-only issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover challenges at Big Tech and startups through the lens of engineering managers and senior engineers. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here.
Why has Shopify dropped React Native?
It’s only been a year since the e-commerce platform declared it was very happy with React Native, but now Shopify is dumping it – and the reason, unsurprisingly, is AI
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Before we start: given this article is about native mobile development, I want to offer my 2021 ebook, ‘Building Mobile Apps at Scale: 39 engineering challenges’, for free to all readers. (normally costs $20). The book remains relevant on the challenges to solve for large-scale mobile applications, and lists the technologies covered below in this article, Kotlin Multiplatform included.
This offer is valid until Friday, 2 October. On checkout, simply select “The ebook: PDF & EPUB versions of the book.” No credit card required! Feel free to share the link with colleagues who build mobile apps, or work on them.
Recently, Shopify dropped the bombshell announcement that Native is now the future of mobile development at the e-commerce platform. This triggered a lot of reaction in the mobile development community, on the scale of the stir Shopify generated when it originally moved over to React Native six years ago.
But times have changed, and we all know the agent of change this time: AI agents! This latest generation of models has improved in coding capability to the extent that Shopify no longer is satisfied with React Native (RN), as it was only last year.
This article looks into what led here, why Shopify made the change, and also the broader mobile ecosystem. We cover:
Why Shopify chose React Native in 2020. Android apps took too long to build, first and foremost, and it was nice to have consistent iOS and Android apps.
Still happy five years later. Shopify moved all six apps over to RN and most things were going well, and the 2020 move was seen as a good move.
Why ditch React Native now? AI is now very good at writing mobile code as well as backend code, while React Native adds abstractions that native does not. Shopify rewrote the Shop app to native in just 12 weeks(!!). Additional details from the Shopify mobile team.
Haven’t we seen this back-and-forth before? Airbnb did something similar by adopting React Native in 2016 before moving back to native just two years later. The underlying reason was the same: performance.
Going native since 2019. Moving to native used to take a long time, and Notion has been at it for seven years. When Notion finishes the process, a fair question will be whether a native editor actually slows down their web iteration speed, with or without AI.
Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) would like a word. KMP allows the writing of business logic in Kotlin and sharing it across iOS and Android while each platform stays native. It’s a technology that feels relevant, and could become more popular with AI.
What’s next? It’s easier to write native iOS and Android apps than before, but that’s also true for React, Flutter, and KMP apps.
1. Why Shopify chose React Native in 2020
Let’s rewind to 2020, when Shopify decided to go all-in on React Native (RN). Back then, mobile was a very important channel for the platform, with seven out of 10 customers using it on mobile devices. As Head of Engineering, Farhan Thawar wrote at the time:
“Each quarter, the majority of buyers purchase on mobile (with 71% of our buyers purchasing on mobile in Q3 of last year [in 2019]). Black Friday and Cyber Monday (together, BFCM) are the busiest time of year for our merchants, and buying activity during those days is a bellwether. During this year’s BFCM, Shopify merchants saw another 3% increase in purchases on mobile, an average of 69% of sales.”
With mobile so important, it’s no surprise the company built native mobile applications for iOS and Android; after all, native mobile gives full control of a platform’s capabilities, integrations, and performance, so why bother with cross-platform technology?
It turns out one reason was the delay in launching native apps on Android, which Shopify struggled with, along with other companies.
When Android takes a year+ to launch: the Clubhouse fail
During the pandemic at the start of the decade, the live conversations app Clubhouse was a massive hit after launching in March 2020. The app was iOS-only for the first 14 months as the team was unable to release an Android app. And at the end of the year, usage absolutely exploded:
December 2020: 600,000 global installs (downloads) (source)
January 2021: 3.5 million global installs (source)
February 2022: 8 million global installs (source)