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Five years of React Native at Shopify

Five years ago, we announced that React Native (RN) is the future of mobile at Shopify. Today, we are excited to share the progress we've made, lessons learned, and what the future holds. To recap, we decided to switch to RN for 3 main reasons: Write it once - Stop building the same features twice, once on iOS and once on Android Talent portability - Enable devs to work fluently across iOS, Android, and Web Ship more value - Spend more time delivering value to users instead of chasing feature parity We’re happy to share that our transition has been quite successful: Not having to build the same features twice has given us a step change in productivity Engineers are able to work across web and mobile allowing teams to do more with the same number of people and unlocked new growth opportunities Maintaining feature parity between iOS and Android has become a non-issue, freeing up capacity to ship a lot more value Our apps are blazing fast (<500ms screen loads) and stable (>99.9% crash-free sessions) We continue to leverage native wherever it is the best tool for the job, giving us the best of both worlds Over the past 5 years, we have migrated all our apps to React Native. Instead of using a one-size-fits-all approach to do so, each team chose when and how to migrate their app. This allowed them to continue shipping features while also aligning with our strategy of leveraging RN. What did we learn? React Native apps are fast We care very deeply about performance at Shopify. As our CEO Tobi Lutke says, “not all fast software is great, but all great software is fast”. The biggest question we had while switching to RN and the main reason we didn’t do it sooner was whether we’d be able to achieve our performance goals with it. Before making the decision to switch, we did extensive prototyping which led to promising results. We also saw all the work that Meta

Not having to build the same features twice has given us a step change in productivity Engineers are able to work across web and mobile allowing teams to do more with the same number of people and unlocked new growth opportunities Maintaining feature parity between iOS and Android has become a non-issue, freeing up capacity to ship a lot more value Our apps are blazing fast (<500ms screen loads) and stable (>99.9% crash-free sessions) We continue to leverage native wherever it is the best tool for the job, giving us the best of both worlds The community is also thriving with several companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla, SpaceX, and Coinbase using React Native and developers shipping high-quality 3rd party libraries and frameworks. This will bring together senior leaders who support RN in their organizations to identify key challenges in the ecosystem, prioritize investments, increase collaboration, and reduce duplicated efforts.

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