Shopify moves mobile apps from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin with AI agents

Summary

Shopify says advances in coding agents have changed the assumptions behind its 2020 decision to standardize on React Native. The company found that agents can now implement, translate, test, and review features across Swift and Kotlin well enough to reduce the practical cost of maintaining two platform implementations. Shopify still considers React Native an excellent framework and says its apps performed well, but native development keeps teams closer to platform capabilities and first-party tooling, with fewer framework and dependency layers. The company prototyped rebuilding core parts of its largest apps with AI assistance and chose a greenfield migration because agents made full rewrites substantially faster than before. The Shop app was rebuilt and published as a native app in 12 weeks; the larger Shopify app, with more than 300 screens plus widgets, an Apple Watch app, complications, and Siri Shortcuts, is underway and planned to ship later in 2026. Shopify will migrate its remaining major apps, including Point of Sale and Inbox, while retaining quality requirements for performance, stability, accessibility, and product behavior. To avoid unusable one-shot translations, Shopify built Helix, which breaks screen migrations into ordered checkpoints. Each checkpoint requires tests, visual comparison with the running app, review by two adversarial code reviewers, and human approval before the next step proceeds; feedback is retained to increase autonomy over time. Shopify also redesigned app architecture so business logic can run headlessly on desktop and be accessed through a CLI. Agents can inspect state, navigate, perform actions, and iterate in milliseconds without relying on slow simulator screenshots or accessibility-tree interaction, while a remote mode supports simulator and end-to-end testing when needed. The transition also changes Shopify’s open-source plans: React Native Skia will receive sponsorship through 2026 before its maintainer forks it, FlashList will receive critical compatibility fixes while new stewardship is sought, and Restyle will be archived after 2026. Shopify says it will measure success through product velocity, app quality, and the amount of work agents can complete autonomously.