Last week the frontend and mobile dev community sat up when Shopify announced it was moving its mobile apps off React Native and back to Swift and Kotlin. Shopify went all-in on React Native in 2020, and as recently as January 2025 Shopify’s head of mobile Mustafa Ali wrote that its future looked bright and that Shopify would keep investing in it. Not quite two years later, the company has reversed course.
I am paying attention because, although plenty of companies switch mobile frameworks, Shopify is enormous and has been arguably the most visible enterprise advocate of React Native outside of Meta. It published detailed retrospectives and shipped important libraries like FlashList and Skia.
Shopify’s move is one instance of a pattern we at RedMonk have been tracking a lot this year. Large-scale architectural changes that used to be dismissed as too risky or too expensive are getting done, because agents changed the cost of writing new code. One flagship example is Bun. In May, Jarred Sumner announced that Bun, the JavaScript runtime which was originally written in Zig, had been rewritten in Rust using Anthropic’s Fable model.
In this respect, Shopify appears to number among the growing list of projects that teams would once have concluded a rewrite to be technically infeasible, but are now saying: rip off the band-aid, let’s proceed.
Community Reaction
There have been numerous takes regarding Shopify’s decision, at a range of Scoville levels of spiciness. The hosts of Frontend Fire chatted about it in depth (definitely worth a listen). Alberto Moedano, Founder & Educator at Code with Beto, asks “Is React Native Dead?” This thread on r/reactnative has quite a few hot takes, including one from James Ide, co-founder and CTO at Expo:
My understanding is it was more of a political decision than a technical one, and compared an existing app using old version of React Native to a newly written one. In some ways the post was outdated when it was published.
It’s worth mentioning that React Native has weathered some high profile departures in the past. In 2018, Airbnb abandoned the framework. But Shopify’s decision is hitting the community differently in our agentic age.
Ali’s announcement says its React Native apps are plenty fast, but the economics have changed. The original case for React Native rested on not building every feature twice—once on Kotlin for Android, once on Swift for iOS—and Shopify’s position now is that coding agents do enough of the implementation, translation, testing, and review work that building twice is no longer the deciding factor it once was. Remove that constraint and the remaining argument, according to Shopify, favors native.
This is not the death of React Native
We at RedMonk would caution against reading Shopify’s departure as a verdict on the framework for three reasons.
First, React Native’s ecosystem depth is real and it doesn’t have a native equivalent. In addition to Expo, Software Mansion’s Reanimated, Skia, and OTA update tooling, there are also a massive number of libraries for things like barcode scanning, Stripe, Bluetooth, in-app subscriptions (RevenueCat), and Firebase. These exist because a very large community built them over a decade. Shopify can afford to build its own internal libraries and tooling from scratch. Most teams cannot.
Second, the economics Shopify describes are Shopify’s. For a project this massive, it is difficult to make broad statements or apply their reasoning to SMBs and startups. Shopify has hundreds of mobile engineers and years of native expertise still in the building. A startup shipping web, iOS, and Android with a handful of engineers is still unlikely to want to maintain three different codebases, agents or no agents. For greenfield projects, the write-once argument still holds, and it holds especially well for the long tail of apps that are mostly forms, lists, and API calls.
Third, React Native now has institutional backing that doesn’t depend on any single company’s enthusiasm. The React Foundation formally launched in February under the Linux Foundation, with huge industry support (hear my MonkCast conversation with Seth Webster, the foundation’s executive director). Governance moved from single-vendor oversight under Meta to a neutral, multi-stakeholder model. Significantly, Shopify is not among the React Foundation’s eight Platinum founding members. Microsoft and Amazon, which use React Native in Office, Teams, and the Amazon Shopping app, are.
So: a blow, yes. A loud one, from a company whose advocacy carried weight precisely because it was earned in production. But not a fatal one. What we at RedMonk will be watching is whether other large, well-resourced companies share Shopify’s willingness to maintain multiple native codebases.
Disclosure: Microsoft, AWS, Google, and Expo are RedMonk clients.
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