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I agree w/ advising people to move off React Native, though I think the story that "LLM enabled an otherwise too-expensive migration to consider" is not correct

I agree w/ advising people to move off React Native, though I think the story that "LLM enabled an otherwise too-expensive migration to consider" is not correct. I say this because I was part of a migration from a mid-size React Native app to a Swift/Kotlin native app redo. I did the majority of the technical work on it. The majority of the work occurred before January 2026 and without LLM code assistance, though later features in the app definitely used some. For anyone considering this, I'd say that the migration is definitely worth considering without even taking LLM assistance into consideration. The continued React Native tax of unnecessarily difficult upgrades, impedance mismatch w/ underlying core frameworks, and incredibly uneven library quality just cause your business to really spend a lot of time shepherding the tech over the finish line. It's pretty wonderful to be back in the world of "build, compile, ship, be sure". One thing as a fundamental principle that I think the Shopify article 'gets' at, is the importance of the feedback cycle - investing time in our integration test story very early on both helped w/ my cycle times, and later in providing guardrails for LLM assistance. All to say that this decision is worth considering without even taking LLM assistance into account.

zero_shift 21d ago
> The continued React Native tax of unnecessarily difficult upgrades, My very first experience of RN was having to update an app to handle the mandatory change to 64 bit APKs Which required a massive update not only to several dependencies but also xcode, iOS frameworks, the weird objective C caches that get smuggled into node_modules, _as well as_ all the rigmarole or making the 64 bit APK build work It was completely miserable
- sunaookami 21d ago
  It's still like this and now they release new versions and breaking changes way faster. Not to mention they nudge you to Expo now and outsourced nearly everything to other (outdated) dependencies and companies. Stay far away from RN if you value your sanity, it lead to my burnout.
  - nwienert 21d ago
    This is not true, the last few releases have had almost no breaking changes. There was a really bad period during all their big refactors but they've since corrected for that. And as for outdated dependencies, breaking changes, and unfriendly companies, the reason I ever got into RN was after trying to build an iOS app using SwiftUI (and then bailing to UIKit to no avail). Talk about a borked ecosystem. The frameworks, developer tools, languages, and iteration speed of RN hands down beat any one platform, and you have one model for your data and state which is an unequivocal win. I agree it has plenty of warts, but the arc of progress is that they have been going down steadily. If you're a 3k person developer team where 200ms can cost millions a year, then by all means go purely native. Though I bet if they'd just gone to the new architecture and spent 1/5 of the cost in agents optimizing things and building a few native bridges they'd have nicer apps and be shipping faster.
Rohansi 21d ago
I experienced the same issues but went the other way and migrated from React Native to React. Still one codebase but none of the issues. Performance was better too even though half the code stayed the same.
mexicocitinluez 21d ago
> The continued React Native tax of unnecessarily difficult upgrades I thought I read somewhere that this is what prompted the move. I don't use RN, but apparently the new architecture isn't exactly a drop-in replacement.
andrekandre 18d ago
> cause your business to really spend a lot of time shepherding the tech over the finish line some may be better than others, but isnt this basically true for all these 'multiplatform' systems? i have nightmares of all the time it took with handling platform-boundaries/integration and lots of other grinding...

zero_shift 21d ago

> The continued React Native tax of unnecessarily difficult upgrades, My very first experience of RN was having to update an app to handle the mandatory change to 64 bit APKs Which required a massive update not only to several dependencies but also xcode, iOS frameworks, the weird objective C caches that get smuggled into node_modules, _as well as_ all the rigmarole or making the 64 bit APK build work It was completely miserable

sunaookami 21d ago
It's still like this and now they release new versions and breaking changes way faster. Not to mention they nudge you to Expo now and outsourced nearly everything to other (outdated) dependencies and companies. Stay far away from RN if you value your sanity, it lead to my burnout.
- nwienert 21d ago
  This is not true, the last few releases have had almost no breaking changes. There was a really bad period during all their big refactors but they've since corrected for that. And as for outdated dependencies, breaking changes, and unfriendly companies, the reason I ever got into RN was after trying to build an iOS app using SwiftUI (and then bailing to UIKit to no avail). Talk about a borked ecosystem. The frameworks, developer tools, languages, and iteration speed of RN hands down beat any one platform, and you have one model for your data and state which is an unequivocal win. I agree it has plenty of warts, but the arc of progress is that they have been going down steadily. If you're a 3k person developer team where 200ms can cost millions a year, then by all means go purely native. Though I bet if they'd just gone to the new architecture and spent 1/5 of the cost in agents optimizing things and building a few native bridges they'd have nicer apps and be shipping faster.

Rohansi 21d ago

I experienced the same issues but went the other way and migrated from React Native to React. Still one codebase but none of the issues. Performance was better too even though half the code stayed the same.

mexicocitinluez 21d ago

> The continued React Native tax of unnecessarily difficult upgrades I thought I read somewhere that this is what prompted the move. I don't use RN, but apparently the new architecture isn't exactly a drop-in replacement.

andrekandre 18d ago

> cause your business to really spend a lot of time shepherding the tech over the finish line some may be better than others, but isnt this basically true for all these 'multiplatform' systems? i have nightmares of all the time it took with handling platform-boundaries/integration and lots of other grinding...