Shopify Drops React Native for Swift and Kotlin as AI Changes Cross-Platform Development Tradeoffs

Shopify recently announced it is abandoning React Native to rewrite its flagship apps in Swift and Kotlin. With the significant jump in the quality of AI models, Head of Mobile Mustafa Ali reassessed Shopify’s commitment to React Native, estimating that the benefit/cost ratio of maintaining native codebases across mobile platforms was now above that of using an abstraction layer.