Kotlin Multiplatform

Shopify · Apr 16, 2021

Management of Native Code and React Native at Shopify

Shopify’s Point of Sale team describes how its React Native strategy changed after limitations appeared in complex UI and background synchronization. The team kept complicated views in React Native, improving rendering with why-did-you-render, React DevTools Profiler, Application Performance Index measurements, memoization, lazy renders, and Reanimated 2 for drag-and-drop interactions. For background jobs, it built a native job manager with Kotlin Multiplatform Modules, sharing synchronization logic in common/ while isolating platform-specific file, database, networking, preferences, and threading code through libraries or wrappers and exposing it through React Native native modules. The resulting implementation shared approximately 95% of its code and reduced a medium-sized store’s initial sync from at least 30 seconds to 2–3 seconds, while the article notes KMM’s learning curve and recommends a separate library project for clearer boundaries and isolated sandbox testing.