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Shopify went all-in on React Native in 2020 so it could build features once for iOS and Android and stop chasing parity between the two. Now it's moving all of its mobile apps to Swift and Kotlin.

In January 2025, Mustafa Ali wrote on Shopify's engineering blog that React Native's future was bright and that Shopify planned to keep investing in it. He also wrote the reversal, published September 10. He says React Native remains an excellent framework and Shopify's apps on it are fast, and that coding agents changed the cost of building twice. Two platforms still cost more than one, Ali writes, but agents now handle enough of the implementation, translation, testing, and review that the difference no longer decides the question. In Shopify's prototypes, agents could build a feature on Android using the iOS version as a reference, and the other way around.

Shop went first. A companion post says a core team of six engineers, with feature teams joining midway, took it from proof of concept to native apps in the stores in 12 weeks. Shopify reports that Android startup time was cut in half and that the share of sessions ending in a crash fell tenfold. Those are Shopify's own figures, and neither post says how much of the shipped code agents wrote or what the rebuild cost. Work on the Shopify app is underway. It's the company's biggest app, with more than 300 screens and an Apple Watch app, and Shopify says it will ship later this year.

Ali also describes a system called Helix, shown rebuilding screens in the Shopify app. He writes that pointing a model at the React Native code and asking it to produce the native version in one pass leaves you with unmaintainable code that can't ship. Helix proposes small checkpoints for each screen instead. Each checkpoint has to pass tests and match the running app in a visual review, then get past two adversarial code reviewers and a human sign-off before it's committed. Review feedback is remembered, and Shopify says the loop gets more autonomous as the migration goes on.

My read is that most brands chose React Native or Flutter because two native teams cost too much. If agents bring that cost down, I expect the debate to come back at a lot of retailers. I suspect few of them have the engineering depth to build something like Helix first, and Ali says the shortcut without it doesn't work.

Shopify puts FlashList, its list library, at about 2M downloads a week, and the library has no long-term owner yet. Shopify says it's talking with several companies about taking it on and will keep fixing critical compatibility issues in the meantime. If your app depends on it, check the repo before your next release cycle. Shopify will keep Restyle working through 2026 and then stop maintaining it. William Candillon, who created React Native Skia, plans to fork it under a new name in the coming months.

Shopify says it will measure the move partly by how much work agents complete on their own, though it hasn't published any targets. I'd watch year three, after the rebuild is done and two codebases need changes every week. Will keeping them in sync stay cheap once the people who built Helix have moved on to other work?

Target just put its retail media business under a hotel marketer.

Mark Weinstein started this week as Target's chief marketing and guest experience officer, reporting directly to CEO Michael Fiddelke. He spent more than 16 years at Hilton and was global CMO from 2020 until he left on September 10, overseeing 28 brands and the Hilton Honors program. Target hasn't had a chief marketer since Lisa Roath moved into merchandising.

Roundel and Target+ report to him too. Putting ad sales and the marketplace under the top marketer means Roundel will be judged partly on how shoppers feel about Target.com, which I think is the right call.

Would a chief of guest experience ever ask Roundel to show fewer ads on Target.com?