Lessons From Building iOS Widgets - Shopify

What this post added

This post details the development of iOS widgets for Shopify, focusing on technical challenges and solutions. It covers the decision to use native SwiftUI over React Native due to memory limitations and WidgetKit's architecture. It explains the strategy for fetching data independently from the main app, using a short-lived cache to avoid redundant network calls and session kick-outs, and implementing a flexible decoder strategy for handling various metric shapes. The post also discusses building a single UI view to support multiple widget sizes and the use of Reportify and ShopifyQL for querying business analytics data.