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Shopify announced that native development is now the future of its mobile apps, reversing its 2020 all-in bet on React Native. The company’s mobile team and a Pragmatic Engineer report credit AI-assisted coding with making native development fast enough to drop React Native’s cross-platform abstractions, with the Shop app rewritten natively in about 12 weeks.
Shopify has abandoned React Native as the foundation of its mobile development, announcing that native iOS and Android development is now the company’s path forward for its e-commerce apps. The reversal, examined in a September 2025 report by The Pragmatic Engineer, comes roughly five years after Shopify moved all six of its mobile apps to React Native, and is attributed by the company’s mobile team primarily to the improved coding capability of AI models, which has narrowed the productivity gap that cross-platform frameworks were designed to close.
According to The Pragmatic Engineer’s reporting, Shopify’s decision was driven by a changed development landscape rather than dissatisfaction with React Native itself. AI coding agents are now effective at writing both mobile and backend code, reducing the labor savings that a shared JavaScript codebase once provided. React Native also adds abstraction layers over platform APIs that native code does not, and with the cost of writing platform-specific code falling, Shopify concluded the trade-off no longer favored the framework.
The most concrete evidence cited is the Shop app, which Shopify rewrote natively in about 12 weeks, according to details from the Shopify mobile team shared with the newsletter. That pace would have been implausible during Shopify’s original 2020 migration, when moving to native — or away from it — was a multi-year effort.
The report notes that Shopify had been largely satisfied with React Native in the five years since the 2020 switch, and that the earlier move was itself seen internally as a success. The pivot is therefore not a correction of a failed technology bet, but a response to a new variable: AI-assisted development changing the economics of building separately for iOS and Android.
What the Reversal Signals for Mobile Teams
Shopify was one of the most prominent public adopters of React Native, and its 2020 all-in migration was widely cited as validation for the framework at large-company scale. Its exit carries weight beyond one company: if AI coding tools make it cheap to maintain two native codebases, the core value proposition of cross-platform frameworks — write once, run on both platforms — weakens for other engineering organizations weighing the same decision.
The move also arrives amid a broader industry drift back toward native. The report points to Airbnb, which adopted React Native in 2016 and returned to native by 2018, citing performance, and Notion, which has been rebuilding its apps natively since 2019 — a process still unfinished after roughly seven years. Shopify’s case differs because AI, not performance alone, is the stated catalyst.
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Shopify’s 2020 Bet on React Native
Shopify went all-in on React Native in 2020, migrating all six of its mobile apps. At the time, mobile was the dominant channel for its merchants: Farhan Thawar, then Head of Engineering, wrote that 71% of buyers purchased on mobile in Q3 2019, and that during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, an average of 69% of sales came from mobile.
A key motivation, per the report, was the difficulty of shipping Android apps quickly. Android’s device fragmentation, older OS versions, and performance demands on low-end hardware made native Android development slow. The report cites Clubhouse as a cautionary example: the app launched iOS-only in 2020, took roughly 14 months to reach an Android beta in May 2021, and missed its growth window as usage declined — a delay the report links partly to the difficulty of building for Android at the time.
React Native let Shopify ship iOS and Android features together from a shared codebase, which is why the 2020 migration was viewed as a success for most of the following five years.
“Each quarter, the majority of buyers purchase on mobile (with 71% of our buyers purchasing on mobile in Q3 of last year)… During this year’s BFCM, Shopify merchants saw another 3% increase in purchases on mobile, an average of 69% of sales.”
— Farhan Thawar, then Shopify Head of Engineering, writing in 2020
Open Questions in Shopify’s Migration
The full scope of the migration is not detailed in public reporting: it is unclear whether all six apps that moved to React Native in 2020 have now returned to native, or on what timeline the remaining migrations will finish. The Shop app rewrite is the only concrete example with a reported timeframe.
It is also unclear how much of the 12-week rewrite speed is generalizable beyond Shopify, whose teams had prior native experience, versus a result specific to that app’s architecture. The report itself notes that AI has made writing React, Flutter, and Kotlin Multiplatform apps easier as well — meaning the same tools that pushed Shopify to native could equally strengthen the cross-platform case elsewhere. Whether other large companies follow Shopify’s lead remains to be seen.
Kotlin Multiplatform and the Native Path Ahead
The report highlights Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) as a technology that may gain from the same AI-driven shift. KMP allows shared business logic in Kotlin while keeping iOS and Android interfaces fully native — a middle path between Shopify’s two extremes that could grow in popularity as AI lowers the cost of writing it.
For Shopify itself, the next milestone is completing the native migration across its app portfolio and demonstrating that native development, assisted by AI, sustains the delivery speed that motivated the 2020 React Native move. The wider industry test case is Notion, whose roughly seven-year native rebuild is still unfinished; when it completes, the report suggests, it will show whether a fully native approach helps or hinders iteration speed in the AI era.
Key Questions
Why did Shopify drop React Native?
According to Shopify’s mobile team and reporting by The Pragmatic Engineer, AI coding tools have become good enough at writing mobile and backend code that the productivity benefit of a shared cross-platform codebase has shrunk, while React Native’s abstraction layers remain a cost native code avoids.
Did Shopify’s React Native adoption fail?
No. The report states that Shopify was largely happy with React Native over five years and that the 2020 migration was seen as a good decision at the time. The reversal reflects changed circumstances — AI-assisted development — rather than a failed bet.
How fast was Shopify’s native rewrite of the Shop app?
According to details from Shopify’s mobile team, the Shop app was rewritten natively in about 12 weeks.
Have other companies made similar moves?
Airbnb adopted React Native in 2016 and returned to native by 2018, citing performance. Notion has been rebuilding its apps natively since 2019, a process still ongoing. Shopify’s case is distinct in that AI capability, not performance, is the stated driver.
Does this mean cross-platform frameworks are dead?
No. The report notes that AI has also made building React, Flutter, and Kotlin Multiplatform apps easier, and highlights KMP in particular as a technology that could become more popular. The comparison basis for any broad industry shift is still unknown.
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