Shopify Head of Mobile Mustafa Ali says the switch is not about React Native being slow: agents now do enough implementation, translation, testing and review that building each feature in Swift and Kotlin no longer carries its 2020 cost.
Shopify rewrote its Shop app as a fully native app in 12 weeks and plans to move all its mobile apps to Swift and Kotlin using AI, saying each rebuild must meet or exceed current performance, stability and accessibility.
To keep two native codebases aligned, Shopify built one shared test suite that validates business logic in both Swift and Kotlin; a feature cannot ship until it passes the same tests on both, and the logic runs headless on desktop for fast AI agentAn AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.Full definition → feedback.
Per Ali, moving to React Native's New Architecture gave Shopify only modest gains: app startup about 10% faster on Android and 3% on iOS, with some complex screens slower until tuned.
Shopify first adopted React Native mainly to ship Android versions faster, starting with the Shop app (then Arrive) in 2018, and later cited sub-500ms P75 screen loads and over 99.9% crash-free sessions after five years on it.
Terms in this piece · Glossary
AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
Why it matters
Shopify concluded that AI coding agents now make native iOS and Android development viable at scale, undercutting the cross-platform case that led it to React Native. Teams weighing framework choices should reexamine the code-reuse tradeoff.
