---
title: "Five years of React Native at Shopify"
description: "Shopify reviews five years of using React Native (RN) as its mobile strategy, adopted to avoid duplicating features across iOS and Android, improve talent portability, and ship more value. Over that period, all of its apps migrated to RN through team-led, non-uniform plans, while native code remained part of the architecture rather than an alternative to eliminate. The company reports sub-500ms P75 screen loads in the Shopify app, similar performance across its apps, and more than 99.9% crash-free sessions, while noting that performance depends on applying sound patterns. Its experience credits hot reloading and TypeScript with developer productivity and cross-platform staffing, but identifies debugging, RN upgrades, and third-party dependency maintenance as costs. Shopify now emphasizes shared libraries, native expertise for platform-specific work, continued New Architecture adoption, and collaboration with the RN ecosystem."
---

# Five years of React Native at Shopify

[Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify) · 2023-10-18 · Jan 13, 2025

**Type:** Explainer

## Summary

Shopify reviews five years of using React Native (RN) as its mobile strategy, adopted to avoid duplicating features across iOS and Android, improve talent portability, and ship more value. Over that period, all of its apps migrated to RN through team-led, non-uniform plans, while native code remained part of the architecture rather than an alternative to eliminate. The company reports sub-500ms P75 screen loads in the Shopify app, similar performance across its apps, and more than 99.9% crash-free sessions, while noting that performance depends on applying sound patterns. Its experience credits hot reloading and TypeScript with developer productivity and cross-platform staffing, but identifies debugging, RN upgrades, and third-party dependency maintenance as costs. Shopify now emphasizes shared libraries, native expertise for platform-specific work, continued New Architecture adoption, and collaboration with the RN ecosystem.

## Context

Shopify adopted React Native to avoid building the same mobile features separately for iOS and Android, let engineers work across web and mobile, and spend more capacity delivering user value. The company also needed to determine whether React Native could meet its performance goals at scale.

## Approach / What changed

Shopify migrated all of its apps over five years using team-specific timing and plans rather than a single rollout model. Teams combine React Native for most features with native code for hardware-intensive, memory-constrained, or long-running background work. The company trained native developers, added web expertise, assigned developers to React Native upgrades, automated dependency updates and code scanning, and began extracting shared libraries such as Identity, real-time monitoring, and performance measurement.

## Takeaways

- Shopify reports sub-500ms P75 screen loads in its Shopify app, similar performance across its other apps, and more than 99.9% crash-free sessions; it says React Native is not inherently slow and native is not inherently fast.
- Shopify treats native expertise as essential for platform bindings, build and release processes, device-specific performance, OS updates, and platform features that React Native is not suited to handle.
- React Native updates require significant work, debugging is weaker than on iOS and Android, and broader third-party library use increases maintenance and supply-chain risk; Shopify mitigates dependency risk with Dependabot and automated code scanning.

**Tags:** [Android](https://yomu.fyi/topic/android), [Architecture](https://yomu.fyi/topic/architecture), [iOS](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ios), [Performance](https://yomu.fyi/topic/performance), [TypeScript](https://yomu.fyi/topic/typescript)

- Source: [Shopify](https://shopify.engineering/five-years-of-react-native-at-shopify)
- Source URL: https://shopify.engineering/five-years-of-react-native-at-shopify
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-30T13:20:06.370Z

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