Five years of React Native at Shopify (2025) - Shopify

This post details Shopify's five-year journey with React Native (RN) for mobile development, highlighting its success in achieving productivity gains, talent portability, and faster value delivery. Key learnings include RN's performance capabilities, the benefits of hot reloading and TypeScript for talent portability, the crucial role of native developers and native code for specific use cases, and the challenges in debugging and RN updates. The post also discusses the increased reliance on third-party libraries and the importance of shared foundations for leverage. The future outlook emphasizes the adoption of RN's New Architecture and continued contributions to the RN community. The company's strategy has evolved from a 'React Native first' approach to a 'native and React Native' hybrid model, leveraging native code for cutting-edge features and background jobs while using RN for the majority of features.