Shopify announced in January 2025 that it is transitioning away from React Native back to native iOS and Android development, reversing a major 2020 decision to consolidate its mobile stack.
According to the company’s engineering blog, the shift was driven by significant improvements in large language models and AI coding agents. When Shopify adopted React Native in 2020, building the same feature twice—once for iOS and once for Android—represented a substantial cost. That core assumption has changed. “By late 2025, they were no longer just helping us write code faster. They were capable of making us question whether building software twice still meant doing twice the work,” the company wrote.
Shopify has been using LLMs since 2021 to assist with feature implementation, bug fixes, and code review. The company rebuilt several core parts of its largest apps in Swift and Kotlin using AI agents and found that these tools could implement features on one platform using the other as a reference, help developers ramp up outside their primary stack, and reduce the cost of maintaining parity between platforms.
The company stated that native development now offers advantages that outweigh the duplication cost: it keeps Shopify closer to platform capabilities and first-party tooling, with fewer framework and dependency layers between code and the platform.
Shopify is pursuing a greenfield approach—rebuilding apps from scratch rather than gradually migrating existing code. The Shop app, a top-ranked shopping app, was rebuilt in native code in just 12 weeks with AI assistance. The Shopify app, the company’s largest with over 300 screens plus widgets and Apple Watch features, is currently being migrated and will ship later this year.
To prevent low-quality AI-generated code, Shopify built a system called Helix that breaks migrations into small, reviewable checkpoints. Each checkpoint must pass tests, match the running app visually, survive two adversarial code reviews, and receive human approval before proceeding.
Regarding its open-source React Native libraries, Shopify will continue sponsoring React Native Skia through the end of 2026, maintain critical fixes for FlashList (which sees 2 million downloads weekly), and archive Restyle while keeping it functional through 2026.
Key facts
- Shopify is rebuilding its major mobile apps in native Swift and Kotlin instead of React Native
- AI coding models improved enough that building the same feature twice no longer costs as much as it did in 2020
- The Shop app was rebuilt in native code in 12 weeks with AI assistance
- Shopify built a system called Helix to ensure AI-generated code quality through checkpoint-based reviews
- The company will continue maintaining its FlashList open-source library but is archiving Restyle