Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify (2026) - Shopify

In 2020, Shopify moved to React Native to avoid building apps twice, but by 2026, AI coding agents made dual native development faster than maintaining a cross-platform layer. 👇

React Native delivered on its original promises, but it came with unavoidable friction. Shopify spent continuous engineering effort tuning performance, applying framework upgrades, and managing abstraction layers between their code and the underlying platform.

Shopify is now abandoning React Native and shifting its mobile stack back to native Swift and Kotlin across all core apps, including Shopify, Shop, Point of Sale, and Inbox.

The decision came down to how AI coding models evolved. Shopify has used LLMs since 2021, but by late 2025, agents became capable of porting full features across platforms. An engineer writes a feature in iOS, and an agent uses that code as a spec to implement the Android version in Kotlin, complete with unit tests and review checkpoints.

Because agents handle platform translation and help non-mobile devs contribute outside their primary stack, the cost of dual native maintenance plummeted. This unlocked a complete greenfield rewrite. Prototyping showed that agents could rebuild entire apps from scratch faster than a gradual brownfield migration, using the existing React Native apps as a reference spec.

Shopify gains direct access to native platform capabilities and first-party tooling without extra framework layers. As part of the move, they are stepping back from their React Native open-source projects—including FlashList, which hits roughly 2 million weekly downloads—to focus entirely on native development.