Member-only story
Thoughts on React Native and Shopify
Is Shopify taking the correct approach to rewritting their React Native apps
Originally published at https://fek.io on September 13, 2026.
If you have been living under a rock for the last week, you might have missed a blog post from Shopify announcing that they were moving their apps from React Native to native. These types of posts get lots of attention because they tend to be very controversial.
The gist of the post is that Shopify is using AI coding agents to help them move from React Native apps to native apps on iOS and Android.
Before I dive too deep into this, it might help to know a little about my background as a mobile developer. In 2016, I was working as a .NET developer. I had been building iOS apps outside of my day job and was offered a job as an iOS architect at a small software company in Florida. Back then, we developed our applications natively as Objective-C apps on iOS and Java apps on Android. At that time, we took a look at React Native and decided that it was not mature enough as a cross-platform framework for our apps.
Not too long after this, in 2017, Airbnb published a series of blog posts on why they were switching from React Native to native apps. Airbnb had been one of the largest sponsors of React…
