React Native

Let's dive in.

Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin.

Shopify.

The company reevaluated its mobile app strategy in 2025 due to advancements in coding models and AI.

After initially adopting React Native in 2020 for efficiency and developer flexibility, Shopify found that AI and improved native coding tools made building separate native apps in Swift and Kotlin more feasible and desirable.

They discovered that agents could help rebuild apps faster, reduce maintenance costs, and bring apps closer to platform capabilities, leading to a shift back towards native development.

The first apps to migrate include the Shop and Shopify apps with other projects following soon.

Welcome back to another episode of the React Native Radio podcast.

Episode 373, Real Life React Native, Mark Goldstein with Chime.

Hi, everyone.

I'm Mazen Chami, and we're reviving our series on React Native Radio called Real Life React Native.

This is the series where we interview developers who work on real-life React Native apps.

They're quick, rapid-fire, and fun.

I feel lucky to be a part of it and to see the space evolve and the new changes with React Native and now the React Foundation are all really exciting and encouraging that this was the right decision and I would do it all over.

Awesome.

Yeah, I actually have something like something similar.

I am right now working on releasing a redesign of my Vidnotes web app and that's a huge redesign for the web application and the rewrite to React Native also with the redesign and with introduction of an avatar and basically I was kind of ready to release the web version until GPD Astra came out and everybody started saying that it's really good at the 3D design for example and working inside blender and i gave so i decided i'll give it a try and create that avatar in 3d and we'll see if i like having this i will be able to have that 3d avatar inside the app and basically if it is going to match what i have like right now like before gpdx extra i had generated like the avatar with image generation and videos and it's just it was like a few states of that avatar a few emotions showed a few emotions but those were basically static videos nothing else of this 3d avatar and i gave gt gpt six astra this task okay take take a look at the video take a like and let's create it in blender i don't know i gave the task and then i i think i left home and And basically I didn't even have Blender on my computer.

Bear in mind, I didn't have that.

It downloaded Blender, it opened Blender, it started the MCP and it executed the task so well.

And then I asked it to have like really like mouse tracking on web for that.

So it is a little bit more interactive.

I asked it to have like more expressions really i was trying to have like move into the direction of having that like knowledge assistance basically on the on video video knowledge assistant vibe and i am pretty happy with the results right now and i will be releasing that finally this week the redesign for the web the react native we'll try we'll probably have to wait one more week until it's ready because i've had some more porting of the iOS and Android features I'm glad that you've added the feedback thread React Native package and so I'll be able to use it but yeah this was for me for this was a kind of game change and there are a few other things that I believe Astra is really good at like computer use and like like for example the the design tasks like regular design i agree fable is still a king in that area and but but i i would say like that 3d thinking and the way he did astra was able to crash it out of the like the box in i don't know it didn't take it much time I feel like it's a really capable mobile and I've trolled at GPT Astra even more tasks that wasn't regular.

I'm using a few different setups right now for my coding assistance and for example, I also use Cloud, I use Codex and For me, when I used, I had been on $100 OpenAI subscription for I think one or two months already.

I want to leave you in this thought to ponder.

The sources note that React Native uses these exact same architectural concepts, like components, state, props, to control native mobile UI instead of web DOM nodes.

If React's core logic is completely decoupled from the display medium, What other futuristic interfaces could you theoretically orchestrate using these exact same component structures?

That is a great question.

And you know why I wrote it? Because I met so many people, a much bigger company, and two things had happened.

I had started to build up an actual presence in the community because I was writing about and talking about these technologies like GraphQL and React Native, which were emerging at the time, right? And then I also had enough job security at that point.

I had worked like seven or eight different jobs in tech.

I also understood tech a lot better and knew that I could find jobs where they wouldn't hold my background against me, right? And so I just had realized like, okay, I am now in a position of privilege where I don't any longer have to lie or hide my past.

And these are tasks that straight up, I mean, like Rafael, you would have been like, well, I got a React app, and I guess that's what we got.

Early stage startup migrating from like React to React Native or whatever, that's just – you would really have to sit down and chew on that.

You would anguish over this decision over the weekend as a founder.

Do I really want to stop the world and refactor? Am I going to get the tradeoffs that I want? I don't know the risk.

And so when Cloud Code came out, I was like, OK, this is amazing, right? And so the problem that we hit immediately when we started our company was that we were writing so much code, and it's so annoying to manage 15 different cloud code sessions in Tmux.

This was before Cmux came out and a lot of these other new tools that let you manage agents a little bit better.

But also, as a React Native developer, I just feel like we have limited returns on investing in the terminal.

when we compare it to the web or when we compare it to the mobile apps, because we have really, really nice UX goodies in the web and on mobile.