Five years of React Native at Shopify

This strikes me as curiously defensive, in that Canadian way of praising things that are obviously problematic to draw attention to them.

The wider noise around React Native is seemingly that it works, especially while iterating on things, but it makes the final 20% of work much harder than it already was. As one person put it to me recently “with RN you just have to face the fact you won’t be winning any design awards”.

What really amazes me is how far React Native and web React have separated, to the point using the web one is a complete non event.

I just kinda looked around the Shopify app to get a feel for it. There are a few frameworks that tap into native view switching (transitioning between pages and tabs), which creates most of the native feeling (along with native view components like lists/menus/switches).

I don’t know why the quality of the app feels cheap, but it just feels so (the web views load in with zero ease, they just jank onto the screen. So while you have native screen transitioning, you still have this low quality feeling of a bad nypost article shitting out an ad popup on you. Hard to explain, but that’s my my general feeling).

Regardless, while not impressive, it’s in this non-impressiveness that informs my unwillingness to invest into native or something like Flutter. These apps are too simple to go through the hoops.

Shopify RN app is a good example of a mundane non-sexy tech decision.

Overall nothing beats CSS and JavaScript for UI, but even in 2025 we cannot reliably push 60fps.

Flutter does 120fps no problems and has for some time now. Its also a lot nicer to work with Dart than Typescript.

Entirely subjective and I would disagree with dart. JSX is one of the most important things react ever popularised in the frontend space.