Until now, the standard for all mobile development at Shopify was native mobile development. We built mobile tooling and foundations teams focused on iOS and Android helping accelerate our development efforts. While these teams and the resulting applications were all successful, there was a suspicion that we could be more effective as a team if we could:
- bring the power of JavaScript and the web to mobile
- adopt a reactive programming model across all client-side applications
- consolidate our iOS and Android development onto a single stack.
As a React (Native) Developer (although I’ve been dabbing more PHP lately; ahem!) I can only applaud this move. Good to see Shopify move to React Native, with the explicit intention of making core contributions along the way.