Five years of React Native at Shopify
Article Summary
Shopify went all-in on React Native five years ago. Here's what happened when they migrated every single mobile app.
Shopify's Director of Engineering shares hard-won lessons from a complete platform migration. They switched from native iOS/Android to React Native across all apps to stop building features twice and unlock cross-platform talent.
Key Takeaways
- Apps hit sub-500ms screen loads with 99.9%+ crash-free sessions
- Hot reloading eliminated multi-minute compile times that broke developer flow
- TypeScript enabled web devs to ship mobile and vice versa
- Native expertise remains crucial for performance, widgets, and hardware features
- Debugging is still flakey compared to native tooling
React Native delivered the promised productivity gains without sacrificing performance, but success required mixing native and web expertise on every team.
About This Article
Shopify teams kept solving the same problems over and over. Each team built React Native features on their own, without any shared foundation or common tools.
By the end of 2023, Shopify pulled out common components like Identity, real-time monitoring, and performance measurement into shared libraries. Now all apps use these libraries, and expertise spreads across teams.
Teams no longer duplicate work. They automatically get improvements when common components get better. This frees up engineering time to build more features that users actually want in 2025.