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- Hacker News
- I first learned about the shopify app when I saw a purple "shop" checkout button. Next, I got an email saying that if I wanted to track my package I needed to download an app. No thank you. I don't want your app on my phone. I don't want to browse other stores in the shop app. I want to see my package and its status without enjoying a new "social shopping experience" or whatever.
I now avoid buying things from anyone who use the dreaded purple "shop" button.
by blendergeek - Never bought anything that used Shopify and never will. As a Canadian, Lutke is just a pathetic individual and I simply refuse to use anything he touches if I can avoid it.
- true absolute cancerous bsby fHr
- I've been trying to minimise the number of apps I have. Every app needs to be justified in that I actually need it, and there is simply no way it could have been provided as a website.by Gigachad
- If you put every company that needs/has an app on a spectrum, there is a line somewhere that roughly divides them into two groups: where Electron/React Native/etc. makes sense or not. It's just a normal engineering decision: solving problems given limited resources. Companies have different problems and different resources.
I think people in the tech community have probably also noticed that it's rather popular to have an absolute opinion on the goodness or badness of these tools. There's some magical thinking borne from ignorance that everyone just ought to go native or that React Native is the best thing ever to be used everywhere or that AI makes this line disappear entirely.
I think these takes serve little value and distract from what’s interesting, and what the subtitle to this article says: that this line is moving due to AI. And I think that’s probably right.
by Waterluvian - These takes are also a bit premature. Wait until the new apps have rolled out and users are happy.
Most likely this will work out fine, but big rewrites like this have a big enough chance of going off the rails that I wouldn't shout success from the rooftops just yet. I'm sure Digg engineering was proud of their rewrite too.
by stickfigure - its sad that the only reason warranting this switch is AI.
I would have loved to see some performance benchmarks on some critical app flow.
by prisonguard - Using cross-platform web technology is absolutely a nuanced engineering decision that is the right one for many businesses. What is categorically bad is bundling a standalone browser runtime for every single service, wasting user’s storage and memory when you could just have a website in a browser.
Is there any major browser now that doesn’t support saving websites as apps? Electron is simply a suboptimal and incorrect way of producing web apps.
by wwalexander - > I think people in the tech community have probably also noticed that it's rather popular to have an absolute opinion on the goodness or badness of these tools.
For a while it seemed that having deeply held, nuance-free opinions about technologies was a sign of being wise and experienced.
The slightly lighter version of this was having near-absolute convictions but leaving a tiny exception for extreme cases to try to demonstrate that you weren’t being unreasonable.
These would usually follow trends when something would spread like a meme. Recent examples include “Everyone should use SQLite for everything” and the ironically closely related “Just use PostgreSQL for everything”. The typical pseudo-nuance would be “unless you have FAANG scale” to imply that there is no nuance until your user base includes most of the developed world.
by Aurornis - > I think people in the tech community have probably also noticed that it's rather popular to have an absolute opinion on the goodness or badness of these tools.
I don't think that's necessarily true. Nuance is a thing.
These tools are bad, objectively! They give inferior user experiences, and waste resources (ever more important now with RAM prices what they are).
But that doesn't mean I can't understand or even agree with a company for using them. Building the same native application for more than one platform is expensive and time-consuming. Most of the time I'm happy to prefer an app built with a cross-platform framework vs. not having one at all.
(To be fair, though, if there's a webapp, 90% of the time I'll prefer that over an Electron app. But nothing meets a well-built native app.)
by kelnos - And the “makes sense or not” part can change based on a bunch of factors.
It’s actually pretty common for a new company to start fully native (only iOS, few features, limited scope), then switch ro react native/electron (need to support more surfaces, features are being developed too quickly), then back to fully native (can afford individual dev teams for each platform).
by paxys - And I'm just sitting here looking at the Codex desktop mac app wondering why a list, a chat window and textbox require a 579 MB download (compressed) and 4 GB of RAM.
- I'm working to solve this...by simonhamp
- An entire copy of libreoffice, for one.by Nathanael_M
- It seems like Shopify has fallen into a trap thinking that more complexity costs nothing because of AI. In the age of AI we have to embrace the same principle as before that complexity needs to be tamed, not multiplied. Even as humans struggled with complexity, from what I see now AI struggles very much the same. Hence I don't think this will age well.by ernsheong
- We should understand the complexity we are adding but having LLMs as a tool does also make managing the complexity easier.by jbs789
- Yeah the problem is AI would improve exponentially and can do work 24/7
any engineering problem is just 'when' and 'how much' at that point
by tonyhart7 - Always relevant - https://grugbrain.dev/by N_Lens
- Armchair / gut feeling opinion: using AI makes a developer feel like they can manage more code than they normally would. But it's a risk, if an agent can no longer make sense of the code, or the developer can no longer make sense of what the AI is saying, you're in trouble.
Not a new problem, of course - developers wrangling large amounts of code (more than they should or can) is a recurring challenge in the industry.
by Cthulhu_ - Another scary thing is with AI it's easy to let complexity get out of hand to the point where a human manually writing code is basically impossible. Even though AI might seem capable of handling the complexity, you'll start noticing all these weird bugs pop up all over your codebase.
- Models have gotten a lot better at generating native iOS apps. The main appeal of RN was being able to leverage your web devs for mobile dev. that's what I did at my last company. And it's fine for a startup, but eventually you want dedicated native engineers bc each platform really deserves its own technical masters who can optimize for it.
But now that all code is generated, there's little upside to having an RN app... just start native. Your devs are barely going to be writing code anyway.
by tonic_note - > The main appeal of RN was being able to leverage your web devs for mobile dev.
There's nothing remarkable about the skill set of either party; the appeal here is re-use of code. how the labor markets itself is irrelevant
- I think there are many reasons why React Native would be unappealing, my experience with it wasn't that positive.
I don't see a reason to use it over web stacks plus CapacitorJS (Or Tauri) or directly native for very large teams.
by bryanhogan - > The main appeal of RN was being able to leverage your web devs for mobile dev.
> But now that all code is generated, there's little upside to having an RN app... just start native. Your devs are barely going to be writing code anyway.
Are you saying:
- webdevs are now able to write and review native code because of AI (who cares if they don't really understand it); or,
- Because developers are more productive we can cut the number of webdevs and hire native engineers – same no. engineers, same output, but now native apps.
Why not:
Continue using RN but now and just enjoy being more productive? If productivity was the reason to pick RN, then enjoy it. It's not a bug.
by kypro - You always still needed a specialist per-platform even if most of the code was RN or KMM[0]. But I agree - a thousand not-great mobile apps sprang from this idea.
[0] I always thought the best answer was something like KMM to do all the backend comms and local data model in a shared way, and then a bespoke UI building on what that shared code exposed.
- This is true in a very real sense – models can help you build native apps very quickly, no question. But how do you keep them from drifting apart from one another as you add/change features or design? Right now, there isn't much tooling for this.
React Native's advantage of having a single source of truth for code hasn't quite gone away yet, imo.
by _fzslm - Nobody is talking about the real advantage of RN: Being able to release to the App Store without having to go through a review. That's so massive. Getting a bug fix out to users instantly, sneaking in optimizations, etc..
Sure, you need a review to release native code changes, and you should probably get a review if you have big feature changes just for the sake of Apple not banning you. But in practice, it removes one of the biggest annoyances of developing for the App Store.
by spiderice - We don’t hold on to a decision just because it was successful at the time. When a core assumption changes, we’re willing to go back and ask whether it’s still the right call. LLMs changed one of the core assumptions behind our 2020 decision, so we reevaluated our mobile stack from first principles.
What we found led us back to native.
by fnthawar2 - Did you switch to SwiftUI or UIKit?by dfabulich
- Any education required for engineers to switch to native or the agents are handling the details on their own? Wondering if architecture or the new languages require ramp up.by fnikacevic