As one of the fastest growing mobile apps in the world, the Shop app serves hundreds of millions of customers and millions of merchants. Since we introduced it in 2020, Shop app has been at the forefront of Shopify’s wider investment in React Native, adopting the framework from its inception. That decision has served Shop app well, but our increasing ability to develop with coding agents has allowed Shop to go fully native, building with Swift and Kotlin.

Why the move

We wrote in depth about our decision to go native, but the TL;DR is that advances in coding agents changed the tradeoffs behind maintaining a shared mobile codebase. Building separately for iOS and Android still has costs, but agents made it reasonable to reconsider that decision.

For the Shop App, this coincided with our next major React Native investment: adopting the New Architecture. That work would have required us to revisit native module integrations, rendering, and the boundaries between shared and platform-specific code. Before committing to this investment, we tested whether coding agents could help us build directly in SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose while keeping product behavior aligned across platforms.

The proof of concept