Shopify just left react native. the september 16 move rewrites its flagship apps in swift and…
shopify just left react native. the september 16 move rewrites its flagship apps in swift and kotlin, with head of mobile mustafa ali saying ai made native codebases cheaper than an abstraction layer.
the cross-platform bet flipped when agents got good.
Context
Shopify Engineering's post Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify, published September 10, 2026, says Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin. It names large apps including Shopify, Shop, Point of Sale and Inbox, and says it rebuilt several core parts of its biggest apps in Swift and Kotlin using LLMs. The post says React Native remains an excellent framework and that its apps are fast, and that Shopify will keep sponsoring a library through 2026 with William Candillon continuing the work. An InfoQ article of September 16, 2026 and a LinkedIn post by head of mobile Mustafa Ali were seen as snippets.
The post is dated September 10, and September 16 matches the secondary InfoQ article. This is Shopify's move for its own apps and not a general departure from React Native, and the post says so. Rewrites its flagship apps is the author's summary of a migration, and the completion status of each app was not inspected, with Shop reported as done only via a snippet. The attribution of the cost quote to Mustafa Ali comes from the LinkedIn snippet only. The cross-platform bet flipped when agents got good is the author's take, and the post's own argument is that agents lowered the cost of building each platform natively.
Related work
- shopify dropped react native and rewrote its apps in swift and kotlin, ↗The earlier note on the same move.
Watch next
- Completion status of each app.
Sources
- Shopify Engineering: back to native (September 10, 2026)shopify.engineering
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 22 September 2026 at 22:16 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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