Five years of React Native at Shopify

I agree with most of the other comments here, and it sounds like Shopify made sound tradeoffs for their business. I'm sure the people who use Shopify's apps are able to accomplish the tasks they need to.

But as a user of computers and occasional native mobile app developer, hearing "<500ms screen load times" stated as a win is very disappointing. Having your app burn battery for half a second doing absolutely nothing is bad UX. That kind of latency does have a meaningful effect on productivity for a heavy user.

Besides that, having done a serious evaluation of whether to migrate a pair of native apps supported by multi-person engineering teams to RN, I think this is a very level-headed take on how to make such a migration work in practice. If you're going to take this path, this is the way to do it. I just hope that people choose targets closer to 100ms.

500ms is the 75th percentile speed, so 75% of users are having load times faster than that. For context, Google's synthetic p75 loads emulate a crappy old Android phone on a bad network.

A linked post[0] says their p75 was 1400ms before 2023, yowza.

[0] https://shopify.engineering/improving-shopify-app-s-performa...

2 seconds to wait for a webpage to load isn’t even that bad. If you take an average user on facebook it is horrendously slow - to someone who knows how fast something can be - but no typical user cares/notices. They just accept it.

Nike’s website is phenomenally quick. But again. Ask anyone if that is what they care about. Nope. It’s the shoes.