Shopify Drops React Native for Swift and Kotlin

E-commerce giant Shopify is shifting its mobile development strategy away from React Native, returning to separate native codebases using Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android. This decision marks a significant pivot for the company, which had adopted React Native in 2020 to streamline its engineering efforts. After six years of utilizing the cross-platform framework, Shopify is restructuring its workflow because AI agents can now handle the heavy lifting of translating, testing, and implementing code across two distinct platforms.

When Shopify originally adopted React Native, the goal was to enable developers to work across the entire stack and eliminate the time spent chasing feature parity between iOS and Android. Maintaining separate native apps historically meant doubling the development and maintenance costs. However, Shopify has found that modern AI agents are now capable of managing enough of the translation, implementation, and review processes to make dual-platform native development economically viable again.

This transition has major implications for the broader React Native ecosystem, as Shopify has been a prominent contributor. The company currently maintains three significant React Native libraries: react-native-skia, flash-list, and restyle. While react-native-skia and flash-list are currently finding new homes within the open-source community, restyle has a smaller user base and is scheduled to be archived at the end of 2026.

For mobile software practitioners, Shopify's pivot demonstrates how generative AI is shifting the math on framework selection. The traditional compromise of cross-platform frameworks—trading native performance and platform-specific features for development speed—may no longer be necessary. If AI agents can reliably port and test code between Swift and Kotlin, engineering teams can deliver highly optimized native user experiences without paying the historical overhead of maintaining two independent codebases.