Shopify Abandons React Native: AI Agents Make Native Apps Cheaper to Build

Models have gotten a lot better at generating native iOS apps. The main appeal of RN was being able to leverage your web devs for mobile dev. that's what I did at my last company. And it's fine for a startup, but eventually you want dedicated native engineers bc each platform really deserves its own technical masters who can optimize for it.

But now that all code is generated, there's little upside to having an RN app... just start native. Your devs are barely going to be writing code anyway.

We did the same thing - had 90% of it overnight. Then spent a few days in the background tweaking for polish.

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.

I'm sitting here at my desk overlooking Cordova Street. The street that Apache Cordova is named after. I've seen this debate for almost two decades now.

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.

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.

What we found led us back to native.

I agree w/ advising people to move off React Native, though I think the story that "LLM enabled an otherwise too-expensive migration to consider" is not correct.

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.

Yesterday, just before bedtime, I pointed Astra at our Electron Desktop app, and asked it to write me a native Swift app for iOS.

The electron app has 750 unit tests and 50 something integration tests. It also had access to the electron app via mcp and could click around and inspect it. I also gave Astra read only access to the backend code.

It worked for 3 hours and delivered a nearly feature complete port. Today, I found in manual testing 3 bugs and 1 performance issue, all of which it fixed afterwards. To fix the performance issue , it made several different builds and profiled them with Xcode.

At around 12:30 I had a full native app port of our product on my iPhone and iPad and could show it to my crew. It even did portrait and landscape correctl!

Needless to say, that I was flabbergasted. On one hand, I love it , I can build now all those cool stuff, but on the other hand, its a complete devaluation of my craft. I kinda tell myself that I was still the one setting up a proper env for it and that not everyone can do it. but thats coping. Freaking coping… and I know it

And I'm just sitting here looking at the Codex desktop mac app wondering why a list, a chat window and textbox require a 579 MB download (compressed) and 4 GB of RAM.

I'm not totally following the part about the simulator(s), probably because I haven't actually done mobile development before.

> When simulator interaction is needed, the CLI can connect to them via a remote mode and drive the UI via commands without having to inspect the layout or the accessibility tree. This enables blazing-fast performance and E2E tests.

I think I'm not following. Don't you still need to test the accessibility tree and layout in the actual layer the user will interact with?

A multi-billon dollar company dropping quarters (performance/ux) to pick up pennies (development savings from not maintaining a native app) never made mathematical sense to me.

[ aside: Meta founded the development of RN and they don't even strictly use it; plus, any troubles/hacks they need, they can make to the Framework itself ]