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Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
Archived — this story has rotated out of today’s deck. It is kept here in full.
The gist
Shopify is moving its mobile apps from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin.
The reversal tests whether AI agents can make fully native apps cheap to build.
Background
Shopify went all-in on React Native in 2020, writing mobile code once instead of building separate Swift and Kotlin versions, and called that bet extremely successful. In January 2025 the company still said React Native's future was bright and it planned to keep investing. Since then, Shopify says coding models improved dramatically, so building the same feature natively no longer carries the cost it once did.
How it unfolded
- 2020Shopify goes all-in on React Native, writing mobile code once instead of duplicating features in Swift and Kotlin.
- Jan 2025Shopify publishes a post saying React Native's future is bright and it plans to keep investing in the framework.
- Sep 10, 2026Shopify says it is returning to fully native development; its consumer app Shop went from proof of concept to native production release in 12 weeks.
- Sep 11, 2026Coverage reports the next target is the merchant app, a 300-plus screen product relying heavily on deep iOS platform integration.
Who’s saying what
- Official
- Shopify says React Native remains an excellent framework, but better coding models mean native Swift and Kotlin no longer cost what they used to.
- Analysts
- Coverage frames the move as a rethink of how codebases are built for AI agents, with an internal system called Helix breaking work into screen-level tasks that agents check before a person gives final approval.