React Native is the Future of Mobile at Shopify

SRANK

After years of native mobile development, we’ve decided to go full steam ahead building all of our new mobile apps using React Native. As I’ll explain, that decision doesn’t come lightly. Each quarter, the majority of your buyers purchase on mobile (with 71% of our buyers purchasing on mobile in Q3 of last year). Black Friday and Cyber Monday (together, BFCM) are the busiest time of year for our merchants, and buying activity during those days is a bellwether. During this year’s BFCM, Shopify merchants saw another 3% increase in purchases on mobile, an average of 69% of sales. So why the switch to React Native? And why now? How does this fit in with our native mobile development? It’s a complicated answer that’s best served with a little background. Mobile at Shopify Pre-2019 We have an engineering culture at Shopify of making specific early technology bets that help us move fast. On the whole, we prefer to have few technologies as a foundation for engineering. This provides us …