Shopify says AI coding agents made native mobile development cheaper, prompting a shift from React Native to Swift and Kotlin

Shopify says it is moving its mobile apps from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin after reassessing the tradeoffs that drove its 2020 cross-platform strategy. The company says improved coding models now reduce the cost of building features separately for iOS and Android, while native development avoids ongoing framework, dependency, and performance overhead.

The move suggests AI is changing the economics of software architecture, not just speeding up individual coding tasks. If native development becomes less duplicative through AI assistance, more large teams may reconsider cross-platform frameworks when performance, platform integration, and long-term maintainability matter most.