E-commerce platform Shopify is dropping cross-platform mobile app development and returning to fully native app development.
The News Stack reported on Sept. 10 that Shopify in 2020 chose to write mobile code once using React Native, instead of duplicating development by using Swift for the iPhone app and Kotlin for Android.
It has now swung back in the opposite direction.
Shopify said its consumer app, Shop, went through a prototype stage and was officially released as a native app in 12 weeks. The next goal is a seller app with more than 300 screens and deep integration with the iOS platform, The News Stack reported.
Shopify did not view its choice of React Native as a mistake. It said the approach did what the company needed. As recently as January last year, Shopify also publicly mentioned a future with React Native. But the arrival of large language models (LLMs) sharply reduced the effort required for native app development, leading Shopify to change its app development strategy.
Mustafa Ali (무스타파 알리), an engineering director at Shopify, said, “LLMs changed one of the core assumptions behind the 2020 decision.” He added, “In the second half of last year, agents handled making an Android version by looking at iOS features, or vice versa. Engineers became able to work on platforms they were not familiar with.”
Shopify initially provided its React Native code as-is and asked an LLM to recreate it, but the output was not very good. Even after it had the model write specifications and work files first, it kept producing code that was hard to maintain.
Shopify then built an internal system called Helix. Helix breaks work into screen-level tasks, compares the existing app with the output, has separate agents find code problems first, and then has a person give final approval. It keeps a record of issues found so they can be used as reference material when working on other screens.
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Chi-gyu Hwangdelight@d-today.co.kr
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