Shopify is moving its mobile apps off React Native and back to native Swift and Kotlin — a reversal it says is only possible because AI coding agents changed the economics of building software twice.
The company went 'all in' on React Native in 2020, and by its own account the bet worked: features were written once, developers could work across the stack, and the team stopped chasing feature parity. As recently as January 2025, Shopify said the future of React Native was bright.
What changed was the cost of the alternative. Shopify has used large language models to build software since 2021, a year before ChatGPT launched. By late 2025, it said, the models could implement a feature on Android using the iOS version as a reference — and vice versa — and could help engineers contribute outside their primary stack. That undermined the central premise of the 2020 decision.
Shopify chose to rebuild its apps from scratch rather than migrate gradually. The Shop app, a fixture at the top of app-store shopping charts, went from proof of concept to a fully rebuilt native app in 12 weeks. The larger Shopify app, with more than 300 screens, widgets, an Apple Watch app and Siri Shortcuts, is underway and due later this year.
To avoid what it calls 'slop,' Shopify built a system named Helix. Rather than one-shotting a screen, it reads the React Native code and proposes small, ordered checkpoints. Each must pass tests, match the running app in visual review, survive two adversarial code reviewers and win human approval before the next begins; feedback from each review is retained so the loop grows more autonomous.
The company also redesigned its architecture so business logic runs headlessly on desktop, letting agents inspect and drive the app through a command-line interface in milliseconds instead of waiting minutes on a simulator.
The shift has consequences for the open-source ecosystem: Shopify will keep sponsoring React Native Skia through 2026, is seeking a new long-term steward for FlashList — which draws about two million downloads a week — and will archive Restyle at the end of the year.
