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Shopify has announced that native development is now the future of its mobile apps, ending its all-in bet on React Native that began in 2020. Reporting by The Pragmatic Engineer attributes the reversal largely to AI coding tools making native development faster, with the Shop app rewritten natively in about 12 weeks.
Shopify has dropped React Native as the foundation of its mobile strategy, declaring native iOS and Android development the future of its apps in a move the company’s own engineers described as a bombshell, according to a detailed report by The Pragmatic Engineer. The reversal ends a five-year, all-in commitment to the cross-platform framework and was driven, the report finds, by the pace of improvement in AI coding tools — which Shopify believes erode the productivity advantages that justified React Native in the first place.
Shopify adopted React Native in 2020 after moving all six of its mobile apps onto the framework. At the time, the company’s then Head of Engineering, Farhan Thawar, justified the decision with mobile traffic data: 71% of buyers purchased on mobile in Q3 2019, and an average of 69% of sales during Black Friday and Cyber Monday came from mobile devices. Cross-platform development promised consistent iOS and Android apps and faster shipping, especially for Android, where Shopify — like many companies of that era — struggled with slow build times and delayed releases.
According to The Pragmatic Engineer, Shopify remained satisfied with React Native five years on, and the 2020 migration was widely viewed internally as a good decision. What changed was not the framework but the tooling around it: the newest generation of AI coding agents is now effective at writing mobile and backend code, and Shopify’s assessment is that React Native’s abstractions add overhead that native code does not, according to the report.
The most striking data point is the Shop app rewrite: Shopify rebuilt the app natively in approximately 12 weeks, a pace the report presents as evidence that native development is now far cheaper than it was when Shopify originally chose React Native. Additional details came from members of Shopify’s mobile team, the report states.
What Shopify’s Reversal Signals for Mobile Teams
Shopify was one of the most prominent React Native reference customers in the industry, and its 2020 migration was closely watched. Its exit — for reasons tied to AI rather than dissatisfaction with the framework itself — is being read across the mobile community as evidence that AI coding assistants are changing the economics of platform decisions. If native iOS and Android codebases can be built and maintained at close to the cost of a single cross-platform codebase, the historical case for React Native weakens.
The report also notes that Shopify’s move echoes Airbnb’s earlier about-face: Airbnb adopted React Native in 2016 and returned to native two years later, citing performance. The difference is the stated rationale — performance then, AI-assisted productivity now. The report also flags Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) as a technology that shares business logic across platforms while keeping each app native, and which could gain momentum in an AI-assisted development landscape.
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The Android Delay Problem That Drove 2020
Shopify’s original React Native decision was shaped by the difficulty of building for Android in the late 2010s and early 2020s. The report cites Clubhouse as an extreme example: the audio app launched iOS-only in March 2020, saw installs grow from roughly 600,000 in December 2020 to 8 million by February 2022 according to TechCrunch data cited in the report, yet did not reach a global Android release until July 2021 — 16 months after iOS. By then the platform had passed its peak, and the report argues the slow Android launch contributed to the business’s decline.
The underlying causes, per the report, included Android’s device fragmentation, older OS versions requiring support, and poor performance on low-end handsets. Shopify’s mobile traffic made Android a market it could not afford to neglect, which made React Native’s shared codebase attractive. That context matters now because the same constraint — the cost of maintaining two native codebases — is the one Shopify now says AI has largely dissolved.
“Each quarter, the majority of buyers purchase on mobile (with 71% of our buyers purchasing on mobile in Q3 of last year [2019]).”
— Farhan Thawar, then Head of Engineering at Shopify (2020)
Questions Shopify Has Not Fully Answered
It is not yet clear how quickly Shopify’s remaining apps will migrate to native, or whether all six apps will move at all. The report does not specify a public timeline, and additional details attributed to Shopify’s mobile team have not been independently detailed beyond the report’s account. The claim that AI tooling makes native development broadly cheaper is Shopify’s assessment, not an industry-wide benchmark, and results may not transfer to teams with different sizes, codebases, or AI tooling maturity. Whether the 12-week Shop rewrite is representative or exceptional is also unresolved.
The Broader Cross-Platform Landscape After Shopify
The report points to several developments to watch: whether other large React Native adopters follow Shopify, whether Kotlin Multiplatform gains share as a middle path that shares logic without abandoning native UIs, and how frameworks like React Native and Flutter respond as AI tooling lowers the cost of all approaches — native and cross-platform alike. The report also raises a longer-term question posed by Notion’s seven-year native migration: whether fully native apps slow down iteration speed for companies whose main product is web-first, even with AI assistance. Shopify’s migration progress, and any engineering blog posts from its mobile team, will be the clearest signals in coming months.
Key Questions
Why did Shopify originally choose React Native in 2020?
To ship consistent iOS and Android apps faster. Android builds were slow, and with roughly 69–71% of purchases happening on mobile, Shopify needed both platforms updated quickly. Cross-platform code let one team serve both.
Was Shopify unhappy with React Native’s performance?
According to The Pragmatic Engineer, no — the company was still satisfied with React Native five years after migrating. The stated reason for leaving is that AI coding tools have made native development fast enough that React Native’s abstractions are no longer worth the overhead.
How fast was the Shop app rewritten natively?
The Pragmatic Engineer reports that Shopify rewrote the Shop app to native in approximately 12 weeks, a pace the company cites as evidence that native development has become far cheaper than it was in 2020.
Did other companies do the same thing?
Airbnb made a similar reversal, adopting React Native in 2016 and returning to native by 2018 — but for performance reasons rather than AI. Notion has also been migrating toward native since 2019, a process the report says is still ongoing after seven years.
Is React Native now a bad choice for other companies?
The report does not claim that. It notes that writing React, Flutter, and Kotlin Multiplatform apps has also become easier with AI. Shopify’s decision reflects its own apps, teams, and tooling rather than a verdict on the framework for everyone.
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