Shopify is moving its mobile applications away from React Native and back to native development using Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android, reversing a strategy the company adopted in 2020.
The company said the decision was driven by advances in AI coding agents, which have changed the cost of maintaining separate implementations for iOS and Android.
Shopify said React Native itself did not fail. Its apps built with the framework had delivered strong performance, but the company now believes the benefits of native development outweigh the previous advantages of maintaining a shared codebase.
Shopify’s latest position represents a significant change from January 2025, when it said its five-year migration to React Native had been successful and that all of its applications had been moved to the framework.
According to Shopify’s account of its React Native migration, the company had reported sub-500-millisecond P75 screen loads in the Shopify app and more than 99.9 percent crash-free sessions.
Shopify originally chose React Native to reduce duplicated work between its iOS and Android teams. Early experiments produced high levels of shared code, including about 95 percent for Arrive, which later became Shop, and about 99 percent for Compass.
The company also said the Arrive team reported being twice as productive during its React Native rewrite.
Shopify now says the economics have changed because AI agents can assist developers with implementing similar features on both platforms.
The agents can use an existing implementation on iOS as a reference for Android, or work in the opposite direction. Shopify said they can also help with testing, translations between platforms and code review.
The company began experimenting with AI-assisted native development after its coding systems became more capable in late 2025. Shopify said it had already been using large language models for software work since 2021, initially for tasks such as feature implementation, debugging and code review.
Shopify tested the approach by rebuilding parts of its largest applications in Swift and Kotlin with assistance from coding agents.
The Shop app became the main proof of concept.
Shopify said Shop serves hundreds of millions of customers and millions of merchants. The application had been running on React Native since its introduction in 2020.
During an initial test, one engineer spent one week using coding agents to migrate as much of the existing React Native application as possible into a native iOS implementation using SwiftUI.
The result was not production-ready, but Shopify said the experiment showed that agents could reproduce screens, interactions and application flows quickly enough to justify a wider migration.
A core team of six engineers then built the native foundations and primary user journeys. Feature teams later joined the work to validate their areas and address edge cases.
The migration involved more than reproducing the application’s interface. Shopify said engineers had to preserve user sessions, push notifications, analytics events, downstream recommendation signals, accessibility, navigation and application behavior.
The team also removed some screens and simplified parts of the application during the rebuild.
Shopify said the full native rebuild of Shop went from proof of concept to publication on the app stores in 12 weeks.
The company reported improved startup times compared with the React Native version. On iOS, native startup averaged 2,466 milliseconds compared with 3,200 milliseconds for React Native, a 23 percent improvement.
On Android, native startup averaged 2,233 milliseconds compared with 4,433 milliseconds for React Native, representing a 50 percent improvement.
The native iOS application was 68 MB compared with 67 MB for the React Native version.
On Android, the native version was 184 MB, compared with 293 MB for the React Native application.
Shopify also reported that release build times on Android were about 75 percent faster, while iOS release build times remained roughly unchanged.
The company said session stability improved from its historical 99.5 percent or higher level to more than 99.95 percent, which it described as a tenfold reduction in crashing sessions.
On a Pixel device, Shopify said the native Android application reached 120 frames per second while scrolling the feed and navigating between screens.
Shopify emphasized that these results do not mean React Native applications are inherently slow. The company said its React Native applications were capable of strong performance and that performance was not the primary reason for the change.
Instead, the company sees greater value in direct access to Apple’s and Google’s native platforms while using AI to reduce the additional engineering effort associated with maintaining two codebases.
To support the migration, Shopify developed an internal system called Helix.
Rather than asking an AI model to convert an entire React Native application in one operation, Helix divides the migration into smaller checkpoints.
At each checkpoint, an agent is expected to understand the existing implementation, propose a migration plan, undergo review, implement the change, prove its behavior with tests and compare the result visually with the original application.
Shopify also subjects the generated code to two adversarial code reviews before human approval. Feedback from those reviews is retained and used as the migration continues.
The company also built Tardis after finding that coding agents could modify software much faster than they could operate mobile simulators.
Tardis gives agents structured access to application events, logs, application state, commands, navigation, screenshots and event windows.
Shopify said this allows agents to investigate problems and validate changes without depending entirely on manual interaction with a simulator.
The system is also used to compare the old React Native application with its native replacement by checking predefined points such as event names, event counts and payload fields.
Shopify is now redesigning its mobile architecture around what it describes as an agent-addressable approach.
The company said it wants business logic to be separated from the user interface so the logic can run headlessly on a desktop environment.
Agents can then interact with application logic through a command-line interface rather than repeatedly launching and operating a mobile simulator. Shopify said this can reduce some development iterations from minutes to milliseconds.
The company said it plans to publish more information about this architecture as work on Helix and its agent-addressable architecture progresses.
The main Shopify app is also being migrated.
Shopify said the application contains more than 300 screens, as well as home-screen widgets, lock-screen widgets, an Apple Watch application, Apple Watch complications and Siri Shortcuts.
The migration is already underway and is expected to reach users later in 2026.
Other Shopify mobile applications will follow, including Shopify, Shop, Point of Sale and Inbox.
The move also affects open-source projects that Shopify has supported as part of its React Native work.
For React Native Skia, Shopify said it will continue sponsorship through the end of 2026. William Candillon, the project’s creator, will continue working on it and plans to fork the repository under a new name, while the current repository will eventually be archived.
Shopify said FlashList receives about two million downloads each week and has become a default high-performance list implementation in React Native.
The company plans to continue addressing critical compatibility issues with FlashList while discussing long-term stewardship with other companies.
Restyle, another Shopify-backed React Native project, has a smaller user base. Shopify said it plans to archive that repository, keep it working through the end of 2026 and stop maintaining it afterward. Another team could fork the project and continue its development.
The reversal closes a notable chapter in Shopify’s mobile strategy.
In January 2020, Shopify said React Native was the future of its mobile development. Five years later, the company described its React Native migration as successful.
Shopify now argues that advances in AI-assisted development have changed the calculation that originally favored a shared cross-platform codebase.
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