Shopify drops React Native for Swift and Kotlin across every app

The 2020 case for React Native rested on one number: two native codebases cost about twice as much as one shared one ^[5]. Shopify now says that number is wrong. Mustafa Ali, who wrote both the 2025 and 2026 mobile posts, does not disown the earlier call ^[3]. "In January 2025, I wrote that the future of React Native was bright... That was true based on what we knew then," he wrote ^[4]. His argument for the reversal is narrow: "coding models have gotten dramatically better, and for our apps and our team, building the same feature in Swift and Kotlin no longer carries the cost it used to" ^[6].

The evidence is the Shop app, a greenfield rewrite that went from proof of concept to a native app in the stores in 12 weeks ^[7]. It starts 50% faster on Android ^[8]. Those are vendor numbers. The only app they beat is Shopify's own older React Native build, and a fresh codebase would be expected to win on size and startup whatever the language ^[10]. Shopify did not say what the agents cost to run ^[9]. Without that figure, the claim that two codebases now cost less than one cannot be checked.

Next in line is the main Shopify app: 300+ screens, home and lockscreen widgets, an Apple Watch app, complications and Siri Shortcuts, shipping later this year ^[11].

The cost of the reversal lands on developers who never worked at Shopify. React Native Skia was forked and archived, Restyle was archived, and FlashList needs a new steward ^[12]. FlashList gets about 2 million downloads a week ^[13]. If you shipped a list in a React Native app this year, you probably shipped it.

Tailwind Labs joined Shopify a day before the React Native post ^[14]. The framework stays open: "Nothing changes with Tailwind CSS or any of our other open-source projects. Everything will always be MIT-licensed," the team wrote ^[15]. Tailwind Plus and ui.sh stopped taking new customers, though existing ones keep access ^[16].

The reason Adam Wathan gave in January is blunt. On pull request #2388, a thread about making the docs friendlier to LLMs, he wrote on January 7, 2026: "75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework" ^[17]. The open-core loop broke at the funnel: developers learned Tailwind from the docs, some found the paid kits there and bought them, and that revenue paid for the framework ^[19].