[hooksfordays]

As someone who worked on the Shopify iOS and Android codebases, I would argue they weren’t all necessarily so broken. The flagship mobile app (the one primarily discussed in the article) was in good shape on iOS (and arguably better shape on Android). There was some fragmentation in architecture among teams, but overall things were reasonable and I didn’t personally find it difficult to jump into unfamiliar sections of the codebase..

Shopify’s other apps that migrated first were either much older, and therefore had much more tech debt, making the rewrite more enticing, or were much smaller in scope, making the rewrite much faster to get to feature parity. Once all the other apps had migrated or decided to migrate, it made a lot more sense to explore it in the flagship app discussed here.

Some disclaimers, I’m no longer at Shopify, and while I worked in the very early iterations of the port of the flagship app, I wasn’t necessarily a vocal proponent of migrating it to RN. I enjoy RN, but I enjoyed working on the native Shopify apps.