I think people in the tech community have probably also noticed that it's rather popular to have an absolute opinion on the goodness or badness of these tools. There's some magical thinking borne from ignorance that everyone just ought to go native or that React Native is the best thing ever to be used everywhere or that AI makes this line disappear entirely.

I think these takes serve little value and distract from what’s interesting, and what the subtitle to this article says: that this line is moving due to AI. And I think that’s probably right.

Our app is smaller, and has about 15-20 screens. I started at about 12:30am by giving codex a goal and it inventoried every screen based on the react native code, then created android and iOS directories, used maestro (I had already set up this tooling for a previous personal app build a few weeks prior), and had the whole thing working in android and iOS in the morning. Took it about 6 hours while I slept.

The app is way smaller, launches instantly, and the android app is (supposedly) native looking. I say supposedly because I don't use android phones. But it's using Jetpack Compose and Kotlin.

And I don't know Swift or Kotlin. I honestly don't see the point of React Native anymore. I know Expo is doing very cool agentic stuff, but I'm just not sure why I'd need any of it when I can write a native app.

What we found led us back to native.

Teams jump on the latest cross-platform framework assuming that it will reduce headcount cost at the expense of having a lowest-common denominator app on each platform.

The latter is true but the former is false.

What ends up happening is that teams start as 20 iOS engineers & 20 Android engineers. They adopt something like React Native. Then you end up with a team of 20 product engineers and 20 tooling and framework engineers.

I've seen that countless times in the last two decades.

I say this because I was part of a migration from a mid-size React Native app to a Swift/Kotlin native app redo. I did the majority of the technical work on it. The majority of the work occurred before January 2026 and without LLM code assistance, though later features in the app definitely used some.

For anyone considering this, I'd say that the migration is definitely worth considering without even taking LLM assistance into consideration. The continued React Native tax of unnecessarily difficult upgrades, impedance mismatch w/ underlying core frameworks, and incredibly uneven library quality just cause your business to really spend a lot of time shepherding the tech over the finish line. It's pretty wonderful to be back in the world of "build, compile, ship, be sure". One thing as a fundamental principle that I think the Shopify article 'gets' at, is the importance of the feedback cycle - investing time in our integration test story very early on both helped w/ my cycle times, and later in providing guardrails for LLM assistance.

All to say that this decision is worth considering without even taking LLM assistance into account.

The meta point of the article, I agree with though. The line is moving and AI makes having multiple platforms with code specific to them faster. Getting them right is still difficult.

Dramatically reduced the cost of maintaining parity between platforms through shared specifications, tests, and review checkpoints

I've used Kotlin Multiplatform on a mobile project built back before AI coding took off, and it was super nice to have shared core logic between the apps and there weren't really any downsides on the Android side, but on the iOS side it was definitely an extra layer that didn't feel fully native.

I am still mourning pre-React GitHub. Maybe rose-tinted glasses, but it was so pleasant to use

I also believed that finally this year react native got mature enough with improved tooling and performance to the point that it started to being 'boring' technology.

That was my thought when I saw the headline and then reading the article confirms this is the inflection point per their own words. Very interesting.

Who wants to bet there still won't be a dark mode?

Maybe React Native isn't the right choice - but two tech stacks for virtually identical interfaces is dumb. Three stacks if you include browsers.

For a while I've been wondering why people are even bothering with high level languages if you aren't even gonna read the code.

I've always been wary of React Native, because my impression is that it hides nuances of the underlying framework. You may be fine implementing 90% of your app but then need that last 10% and may get stuck.

But then I'm also wary of the recent trend by Google to create higher level frameworks on top of native Android APIs. It seems that these days for every Android API family, there is a Google framework that gives you a higher level API. I don't really understand it - is Google admitting that the quality of native Android APIs has eroded? Do they think developers are too inexperienced to deal with native Android APIs?

I'm also not sure I understand the how reasonably large companies consider two native apps to be too expensive. A startup may have a hard time funding both and may need to choose, but an established business should consider not only costs but also the better quality of user experience that native apps provide - that has to count for something.

follow up with some more technical details and benchmarks

Interestingly Apple approved it very quickly, which I was afraid of given such a huge rewrite.

With cheap/fast code, it's easy to support multiple software stacks since most of the abstract engineering problems are already solved.

Code - especially straightforward low-level code - is so cheap and easy to write now that some people are building their own version control systems, game engines, and other low-level tooling.

Thus, some of the most demanding, human-centric work in software dev right now - where we now spend more time than coding - is in technical PM, UI/UX, devops, and overall architecture. The decision-making and design aspects of the job.

Exciting times.

And, in all honesty, the difficult part with many projects is the bootstrap, the scaffolding, not the continuous dev. Agentic dev. made this a piece of cake.

Then they say:

We decided to switch from native to React Native in 2020 for three reasons:

Stop building the same features twice

Allow developers to work across the stack

Spend less time chasing feature parity and more time shipping value

Totally!

Is there some kind of shame in just saying:

- we didn't want to hire more people

- we didn't want to pay those salaries

- we fired a lot of engineers with move to react native/hybrid in mind

- we could reuse the frontend devs (aka "full stack" folks) with or without some extra whippings ensuring they grok the bare minimum they'd need to build for mobile and test in on mobile.

“To solve this problem, we built a system called Helix that takes a more gradual approach. It doesn't expect the first output to be correct, and builds a loop where an imperfect attempt simply cannot move forward until it becomes a good result.”

If this is driven by proper engineering then hats off! Supposedly a simpler app has already been migrated and they are working on migrating the main app using this approach. I don’t even know how I can be a cynic here… because the technology is good enough and so are the engineers I don’t know how management or executives could ruin it.

“…product quality people expect today. This isn’t just the same apps rewritten in different languages. We’re rebuilding them so both humans and agents can understand, test, and change them quickly.”

If this was written using AI and human-edited, you missed a spot.

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.

they are going to "delete an app" because they got some LLM to slop out 2 apps?

The architect who wrote that is batshit and will be unemployed after this blows up in his face.

It doesn't expect the first output to be correct, and builds a loop where an imperfect attempt simply cannot move forward until it becomes a good result.

So... local maxima?

Like wouldn’t you want to invest in platform specific expertise long term?

It’s not like this is a small company or it’s just a dinky side project off of the main business

Talk to me in a year.

The side-by-side comparisons? Whoopty do. It's different code. Of course agents can produce two implementations that look the same today. That's not the hard part.

The hard part is keeping them the same.

Feature parity isn't an implementation cost. It's a divergence cost. It accrues over years across experiments, analytics, accessibility, edge cases, bug fixes, platform behavior, and a thousand little decisions which current agents aren't great at tracking.

Agents can write code fast but they aren't a panacea.

The load-bearing sentence in the whole post is this:

"Shared specifications, tests, and review checkpoints dramatically reduced the cost of maintaining parity."

Okay. For how long? By how much? Got any numbers to share? How will these hold up under contact with customer?

You haven't maintained parity yet. You've built prototypes. You're making a claim about a cost that compounds over time based on what it costs at t=0.

The other thing missing is the counterfactual. They keep comparing this rewrite to what a rewrite would have cost before coding agents. But what if you point those same agents at the existing RN codebase?

If agents make software development cheaper, they make RN development cheaper too. And now you're modifying one implementation instead of generating, testing, reviewing, and reconciling two.

The tooling section makes this even stranger. They find that agents are bad at driving simulators, so they pull business logic out of the UI, make it runnable headlessly, and expose a CLI.

That's a good idea! Do that!

But that's an architecture change, not an argument for native. You can make an RN codebase agent-friendly without rewriting five apps.

Then you get to "Preventing slop," which is probably the most important section in the post. Just pointing an LLM at the codebase doesn't work. They had to build Helix, with ordered checkpoints, test proofs, visual diffing, adversarial reviewers, and human gates.

So what they've actually demonstrated is that Shopify has enough engineering resources and agent infrastructure to make maintaining two codebases look economically plausible.

Maybe it is! For Shopify.

That's a much narrower claim than "AI changes the economics of cross-platform development."

And where are the numbers?

For a post about reevaluating costs from first principles, there's remarkably little cost data. Engineer hours? Review time? Defect rates? Parity failures? Agent spend? Ongoing maintenance? Anything?

They even say RN performance isn't the problem. "React Native apps can be fast. Ours are."

So there's no product crisis here. No performance crisis. There's an internal cost argument, with no numbers, being used to justify rewriting five apps used by millions of merchants.

And in isolation I'd probably just shrug and say: Shopify made a bet. Let's see how it goes.

But it's harder to view it entirely in isolation when they brought Tailwind on yesterday too.

Shopify used to be one of the great stewards of the broader ecosystem. What worries me about the recent direction isn't any single technology choice. It's the appearance that, following the recent tech leadership changes, we're starting to see decisions driven more by the preferences of the people now making them than by demonstrated technical merit.

Maybe that's an unfair read. I hope it is. But posts like this don't help, because if you're going to make a sweeping technical argument for a major change, show the evidence.

The part I actually find convincing is much less exciting: Shopify is tired of paying the upstream tax. They've spent years working on RN performance, improving the framework, dealing with dependencies and upgrades, etc.

Fair enough. That's a real cost. Being an RN framework developer or dependent is -- or has been -- awful -- it's like trying to fly a kite in a hurricane. The web team has been super disciplined and also ridiculously slow. The RN team changes apis in .. questionable ways with regards to compatibility

But it's not new, and it has very little to do with LLMs.

And let's not get me started on taking this kind of dependency for your business on companies who still don't have any idea how much to charge for their tools and are all operating (on a per token basis) at a loss. They're swapping some framework dependency for dependency on coding models whose capability, pricing, and terms they don't control.

None of this means they're making the wrong decision. Maybe they're right. Maybe in three years this looks obvious.

But that's exactly the point.

Come back in a year and show me parity bugs, engineering hours per feature, experiment drift, accessibility regressions, review burden, model spend, and how much human work it takes to keep the implementations aligned.

Right now they've shown that AI makes rewrites cheaper.

Whoopty do.

Perhaps these languages do not work well as they are not designed to run efficiently on mobile devices. Now that we have libraries such as SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose, React Native no longer makes sense to use.

Now we should also move away from Electron to better alternatives such as Kotlin Multi-Platform or fully native libraries on each platform; because of LLMs.

Hermes VM doesn't even have JIT.

If the majority of your app is native code and only a few places are stitched together via JS code that runs in the Hermes VM, then React Native is suitable for you.

Look at V8 vs. Hermes performance.

We use Flutter; we rarely need to write native code. We have three apps: Symbiote workout app, CalorieCodex, an AI calorie tracker app, and MacroCodex with 17,000+ users, all of them completely free