Shopify ditches React Native for native apps, and RedMonk says agents made rewrites feasible again
rseroter · x · 2026-09-23
RedMonk analyst Kate Holterhoff examines Shopify's move to drop React Native and return to Swift and Kotlin — a reversal from the company that was arguably React Native's most visible enterprise advocate outside Meta, having gone all-in in 2020 and reaffirmed its commitment as recently as January 2025.
- RedMonk frames this as part of a broader pattern: large-scale architectural rewrites once dismissed as too risky or too expensive are now happening because agents have slashed the cost of writing new code.
- Flagship example: Bun, the JavaScript runtime originally written in Zig, was rewritten in Rust in May using Anthropic's Fable model.
- The takeaway: in the agentic era, "rip off the band-aid" is replacing the old calculus that made rewrites technically infeasible for large teams.
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