Five Years of React Native at Shopify
Article Summary
Mustafa Ali from Shopify just dropped a masterclass in platform migration strategy. Five years after betting the company's mobile future on React Native, here's what actually happened.
In 2020, Shopify made the bold call to migrate all mobile apps from native iOS/Android to React Native. This retrospective shares hard-won lessons from migrating multiple production apps serving millions of merchants, including performance data, team dynamics, and what they'd do differently.
Key Takeaways
- Achieved sub-500ms screen loads (P75) and 99.9% crash-free sessions across all apps
- TypeScript enabled web devs to ship mobile features, unlocking new staffing flexibility
- Hot reloading eliminated multi-minute compile times, preserving developer flow
- Native expertise remains critical: 100% React Native should be an anti-goal
- Debugging tools still lag behind native, but Meta's complete rewrite shows promise
Shopify successfully migrated all mobile apps to React Native, proving you can build world-class performance while dramatically increasing developer productivity and cross-platform talent portability.
About This Article
Shopify's React Native framework didn't have the shared foundations that native development had built up over years. Teams kept solving the same problems over and over, reinventing solutions for each app.
By the end of 2023, Shopify pulled common components into shared libraries. Identity, real-time monitoring, and performance measurement became available to all apps. This spread expertise across the organization.
Shared foundations stopped duplicate work. All apps automatically got better when improvements were made. Engineers had more time to focus on shipping features that users actually wanted in 2025 and beyond.
