Shopify moves its mobile apps back to Swift and Kotlin, saying AI coding agents removed the case for React Native

Shopify announced today that it is rebuilding its four mobile apps in Swift and Kotlin, five years after standardising on React Native, saying that AI coding agents have taken the maintenance cost of shipping the same feature twice down far enough that the framework's central benefit no longer decides the choice. The post is by Alex Kotliarskyi, who wrote in January 2025 that Shopify planned to keep investing in React Native.

The Shop app, one of the top-ranked shopping apps in the app stores, is already fully rebuilt in native code and shipping. Shopify says the team went from a proof of concept to a published app "in just 12 weeks" with AI assisting throughout. The Shopify app, which the post describes as its biggest with more than 300 screens, home and lockscreen widgets, an Apple Watch app, complications and Siri Shortcuts, is underway and due to ship later this year. Point of Sale and Inbox follow.

What actually changed

Shopify says its prototypes found that agents could implement a feature on Android using the iOS version as a reference and vice versa, help developers contribute effectively outside their primary stack, and cut the cost of maintaining parity between platforms through shared specifications, tests and review checkpoints. The post is direct that the underlying cost has not disappeared: native still means building on two platforms. What changed is that agents now cover enough of the implementation, translation, testing and review work that parity is no longer the deciding factor it was in 2020.

Helix: the tool built to stop the migration turning into slop

To do the rebuild, Shopify built a system called Helix. A developer points it at a screen, Helix reads the React Native code and proposes a sequence of small checkpoints. Each checkpoint has to prove its behaviour with tests, match the running app in a visual review, survive two adversarial code reviewers, and get a human's approval before it is committed and the next one starts. Feedback from every review is remembered so later checkpoints need less supervision.

Alongside Helix, Shopify is redesigning its app architecture so business logic is decoupled from the UI and can run headlessly on a desktop, driven by a CLI. That lets agents inspect state, navigate the app and perform actions in milliseconds instead of the minutes it takes to drive a simulator through the accessibility tree.

What happens to the open source libraries

Three widely used Shopify libraries have new plans. React Native Skia will keep Shopify sponsorship through the end of 2026, then William Candillon will fork the repository and publish it under a new name, with the original archived. FlashList, which Shopify says gets around 2 million downloads per week, is being handed to a new steward Shopify says it is in discussions with several companies about, and Shopify will keep fixing critical breakage in the meantime. Restyle has a smaller user base and is being archived, with maintenance ending after 2026.

Source

Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify on Shopify Engineering, 10 September 2026. Hacker News discussion.