Shopify and Notion Pivot to Native: AI-Driven Development Challenges React Native's Multi-Platform Promise

React Native, lauded for its “write once, deploy anywhere” promise across mobile and desktop platforms, continues to see significant enterprise adoption, with Microsoft standing out as a primary user. The tech giant leverages React Native extensively for Windows 11 applications, Xbox Game Pass, and the Xbox menu, maintaining an official ‘React Native for Windows’ project. Despite this widespread use, the framework remains in a 0.x version (currently 0.87.1), a notable characteristic that prompts discussion around its maturity and long-term trajectory as it approaches its anticipated 1.0 release.

However, React Native’s ecosystem is witnessing pivotal shifts from other high-profile users. Following Airbnb’s significant departure years ago, Shopify has announced a complete migration of its mobile applications to fully native development using Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android. Shopify, which had gone “all-in” on React Native in 2020 and initially reported success in accelerating feature delivery and enabling broader developer contributions, now points to advancements in AI as a key driver for its change. The company asserts that AI can effectively translate native code from one platform (e.g., iOS Swift UI) to another (Android) and vice versa, significantly reducing the overhead for cross-platform development, testing, and review. This strategic pivot has reportedly led to substantial improvements for Shopify, including a 75% reduction in Android build times, doubled runtime performance on Android, and enhanced app stability and reduced size. Kique Fagoaga, Engineering Manager at Shopify, led this transition, and the company plans to continue contributing to the React Native ecosystem where their existing libraries are used.

Adding to this trend, Notion, the popular productivity workspace, is also undertaking a comprehensive rebuild of its mobile applications for a fully native experience. While many believed Notion utilized React Native, its prior architecture was a hybrid model, combining native wrappers with webviews that embedded standard React, rather than React Native. This architecture was widely criticized for its poor mobile performance. Notion’s commitment to native development is not new; efforts to transition to native components on Android began as early as 2019. The current reconstruction aims to re-engineer all components to be truly native, addressing long-standing performance issues that have frustrated users and drove the company’s decision to pursue a full native rewrite.