Migrating to React Native's New Architecture
Article Summary
Shopify just migrated two massive apps to React Native's New Architecture without pausing weekly releases or breaking production for millions of merchants.
Staff Engineer Thiago Magalhaes shares how Shopify's mobile team navigated this fundamental framework change across hundreds of screens and 40+ native modules. This is a detailed playbook from the trenches of a large-scale migration.
Key Takeaways
- Maintained dual architecture support throughout to enable continuous testing and prevent regressions
- App launch times improved 10% on Android and 3% on iOS immediately after migration
- Most bugs were fixed by upgrading React Native versions before touching app code
- Phased rollout started Android at 8%, iOS at 1% to catch issues early
- Avoided migrating to TurboModules initially, focusing only on compatibility breaking changes
Shopify successfully migrated to React Native's New Architecture while shipping weekly, proving large-scale migration is achievable with the right strategy and gradual rollout approach.
About This Article
Shopify's apps were dropping frames and animations were stuttering on both iOS and Android. The culprit was heavy use of Reanimated for navigation animations, but the problem only showed up once they tested at scale in production.
Shopify worked directly with Software Mansion and Meta. They got early access to patches, dug into the root causes together, and pushed fixes back into Reanimated and React Native so other teams could benefit.
Teams using Reanimated with the new architecture now have better performance and fewer bugs thanks to this work. Large-scale early adoption like this can actually improve the whole ecosystem.