Shopify is ditching React Native for native Swift and Kotlin

AI coding agents just removed the biggest reason to pick cross-platform mobile frameworks.

Shopify announced it is moving its flagship mobile apps—including Shop, Inbox, and Point of Sale—back to native Swift and Kotlin. In 2020, the company went all-in on React Native to avoid building every feature twice. But Shopify Engineering says LLM agents now handle enough implementation, translation, and testing between iOS and Android that native development no longer carries its old cost penalty.

Why it matters: Cross-platform tools trade direct platform access for single-codebase speed. If AI agents can reliably translate features between Swift and Kotlin, that tradeoff breaks down. Engineering teams can stay close to native APIs and first-party tooling without doing double the work.

Know this: Shopify is doing a full greenfield rebuild rather than a slow transition, starting with the Shop app. The decision also reshapes major open-source projects: Shopify plans to archive Restyle after 2026, transfer React Native Skia to author William Candillon, and find long-term maintainers for FlashList, which sees about 2 million downloads a week.

When the cost of writing code drops, platform choice goes back to whatever builds the best app.