Shopify drops React Native and rebuilds its mobile apps natively with AI agents

Shopify is moving its mobile apps off React Native and back to native Swift and Kotlin development, unwinding one of the most prominent cross-platform bets in the industry. In a post on its engineering blog, the company says AI coding agents changed the underlying math: writing the same feature twice for iOS and Android no longer costs close to double the work, which was the central assumption behind its 2020 decision.

A reversal driven by AI coding agents

Shopify committed fully to React Native in 2020 for three reasons: to stop implementing every feature twice, to let developers without a mobile background contribute to the apps, and to stop burning time keeping the two platforms in sync. The company says the framework delivered on all three, and that the effort spent on performance tuning, foundational framework work and dependency upkeep were acceptable tradeoffs.

As recently as January 2025, Shopify was still publicly committed to React Native. What changed, the post explains, is not the framework but the capability of coding models. Shopify has used LLMs to build software since 2021, initially for features, bug investigation and code review, and by late 2025 they were strong enough to prompt a full reevaluation of the mobile stack.

The team rebuilt core parts of its largest apps in Swift and Kotlin with agent assistance and was surprised by how well it went. Agents could implement an Android feature using the iOS implementation as a reference and vice versa, help engineers ramp up on stacks outside their specialty, and sharply cut the cost of keeping the platforms aligned through shared specifications, tests and review gates. Shopify also stresses this is not a performance complaint — its React Native apps are fast — but that native development keeps it closer to platform capabilities and first-party tooling, with fewer framework and dependency layers between its code and the operating system.

What happens to Shopify's open-source libraries

Shopify has been a significant contributor to the React Native ecosystem, and the post lays out transition plans for its three flagship libraries. React Native Skia will be sponsored through the end of 2026, after which maintainer William Candillon will fork the repository and publish it under a new name, with the original archived. FlashList, which the post says draws roughly two million downloads a week and has become the default way to render high-performance lists in React Native, will continue receiving fixes for critical compatibility breaks while Shopify discusses long-term stewardship with several companies. Restyle, which has a smaller user base, will be archived and kept working through the end of 2026, with forks welcome.

Full rewrites, one checkpoint at a time

Shopify operates several large apps — Shopify, Shop, Point of Sale and Inbox — used daily by millions of merchants and buyers. When it adopted React Native it migrated gradually, embedding React Native screens inside existing apps. This time it chose complete rewrites, arguing that agents can use the React Native versions as reference material, a clean slate removes old constraints, and prototypes showed rebuilds completing far faster than was previously possible.

The Shop app went first: with AI assistance, the team went from a proof of concept to a fully rebuilt native app published in the app stores in 12 weeks. The main Shopify app, the company's largest with more than 300 screens plus home and lock screen widgets, an Apple Watch app, watch complications and Siri Shortcuts, is in progress and slated to ship later this year. The remaining apps will follow.

The team cautions that pointing an LLM at the old codebase and asking for a one-shot rewrite produces large amounts of unmaintainable code. Its answer is Helix, an internal system that works screen by screen. Helix reads the React Native code for a given screen and proposes a sequence of small, ordered checkpoints. Each must prove its behavior with tests, match the running app in visual review, survive two adversarial code reviewers and get a human's approval before it is committed, and feedback from every review is retained so the loop becomes progressively more autonomous. Shopify also built tooling that lets agents drive simulators, which previously required constant supervision to build, test and iterate.

Why it matters

This is one of the clearest signs yet that AI coding agents are reshaping long-standing architectural assumptions. The core argument for cross-platform frameworks — write the code once — weakens considerably when translation between Swift and Kotlin is largely automated and parity is enforced by shared specs and tests. Shopify's departure also removes a flagship production endorsement from the React Native ecosystem and leaves widely used libraries like FlashList and React Native Skia in transition, which affects many teams far beyond Shopify. Perhaps most notably, the company treated a past success as non-binding: when a core assumption changed, it re-derived the decision rather than defending it.