Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify (2026)

TLDR: they think they can vibecode native mobile apps instead of using react native and get better mobile apps. They're sunsetting the sponsorship of the FOSS things they've sponsored in the react native ecosystem.

I've suggested the vibecoding tag.

I will not be flagging this as off-topic because it demonstrates a concrete shift in industry direction, which will cause changes in how others develop similar apps. That said, Shopify is probably one of the companies most "on board" with AI-generated content (code or otherwise). I look forward to the negative reviews and inevitable corrective maneuvers.

This announcement comes at the same time as buying Tailwind lmao.

LLMs are good at building features in Swift and Kotlin using the React Native version as reference

Unfortunately, my experience with LLMs as well. They function incredibly well for translating information from one language (be it code, diagrams, human language) into another.

The scheming of these big companies in order to keep the AI hype going is staggering.

Shopify is enormously profitable, so this is clearly not about whether they can afford to maintain two native apps. One would perhaps then suspect that it's about whether management considers the "additional" engineering cost of maintaining two native apps worth paying for, but framing AI as what makes this possible is misleading as React Native always results in a huge technical debt and requires substantial work and investment to perform well (as the post also states). While native development duplicates implementation, testing, and maintenance, the benefit is huge for a big company like Shopify, and it's not that much more work. Calling the difference "pennies" may be imprecise, but treating it as a decisive cost crisis seems hard to take seriously.

I believe that this is nothing more than yet another attempt to keep AI hype going because of Shopify's partnership with OpenAI. One of Tobi Lütke most recent investment was Promptfoo, an AI application security and testing platform. His most notable current holding is Perplexity. Other investments in AI companies include Foxglove, a robotics software platform that raised its Series B in September 2025, Pachama, an AI and satellite data company, and several others.

Edit: Not to mention the technical debt of using AI in the first place.