Migrating our Largest Mobile App to React Native

Migrating our Largest Mobile App to React Native

摘要

In 2020, we announced that React Native is the future of mobile at Shopify and since then we’ve been migrating all our native mobile apps to React Native. Since each app is different, there is no single approach that works for all of them. So, we evaluated all the possible options for each app and chose the ones that best suit their needs.

Shopify Point of Sale, for instance, had come a long way since it was first built during an internal hackathon. It was originally designed and built to support small mom-and-pop stores or weekend warriors. However, it has surged in popularity and is being used by some of our biggest merchants and is processing transactions worth billions of dollars each year. The codebase had accumulated a lot of tech debt and the app’s UX was also not serving the needs of large merchants who have hundreds of locations and tens of thousands of products. After a thorough evaluation, it became clear that we couldn’t fix these issues with incremental changes. Hence, we decided to do a full rewrite, which has been a big hit with our merchants.

Shopify Mobile, our flagship mobile app, on the other hand is quite stable and meets our merchants’ needs. It is also our largest app at 300 screens per platform and took over six years to build. Rebuilding it from scratch would be a massive undertaking. Even if we assume that we’d be twice as productive with RN (which is not necessarily the case always), it would take us at least three years to rebuild. That’s a very long time. We would have to halt all new feature development during this time and in the end have the exact same app as we started with. A rewrite then, was clearly out of question.