React Native: The Future of Mobile at Shopify
Article Summary
Farhan Thawar from Shopify reveals why they're betting the company's mobile future on React Native. With 71% of purchases happening on mobile, this wasn't a decision made lightly.
In early 2020, Shopify announced a major strategic shift: all new mobile apps would be built with React Native instead of native development. After years of native iOS and Android work, the VP of Engineering explains the calculated risks, real-world experiments, and performance benchmarks that led to this company-wide decision.
Key Takeaways
- Teams achieved 95-99% code sharing between iOS and Android (vs. expected 80%)
- Arrive app rewrite: developers felt 2x more productive than native development
- React Native now viable on hardware as low as 1.5GHz CPU
- Native iOS engineers still essential for platform components and performance work
Shopify validated React Native's maturity through three production apps in 2019, finding it doubled developer productivity while maintaining performance standards for their massive mobile commerce platform.
About This Article
Shopify's iOS and Android teams were working separately, which made it hard to share code and maintain consistent performance. Retail merchants need their point-of-sale systems to respond instantly, so any slowdown was a real problem.
In 2020, Shopify created dedicated tooling and foundations teams to build SDKs and code reuse libraries for React Native. They also worked with Software Mansion, William Candillon, and Facebook's React Native team to improve performance and contribute to the open source project.
The Point of Sale team tested React Native on Android against native iOS performance and found it held up well. They realized Facebook's Fabric re-architecture wasn't necessary for what they needed, so they moved forward with confidence on their 2020 launch for both platforms.