Why has Shopify dropped React Native?

Shopify is rebuilding its React Native mobile apps as separate iOS and Android apps, because AI coding agents have made building each feature twice cheap enough.

Shopify, the e-commerce platform, began moving its mobile apps to React Native in 2020, a framework that runs one shared codebase on both iOS and Android. After calling the move a success in January 2025, it announced in September 2026 that it will rebuild every app natively, in Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android. Gergely Orosz, who writes the newsletter The Pragmatic Engineer, explains why, drawing on Shopify's posts and on answers from its heads of mobile and engineering.

• Shopify chose React Native mainly because native Android apps took too long to build, and so that it would stop building every feature twice.
• Mustafa Ali, Shopify's head of mobile, says AI coding agents now do much of the implementation, translation, testing and review. Building for two platforms is therefore no longer the deciding cost.
• Shopify keeps one shared test suite for the business logic of both versions, and a feature cannot ship until it passes the same tests on iOS and Android.
• The Shop app shipped as a fully native app in 12 weeks. Ali says every rebuild must match or exceed today's performance, stability and accessibility.

An engineering team that chose a cross-platform framework to avoid building features twice can check whether that reason still holds, provided it can test both versions against the same checks. This is an inference and is not the author's claim, and only the open part of the article was read, because the rest is for paying subscribers.

Derived by Working Surface from the article. Source line: This means that a feature can’t ship until it passes the exact same tests on both platforms.

30 September 2026: when building gets cheap, teams spend the effort on checks, tests and choosing a direction.