Shopify migrates Shop app from React Native to native using AI coding agents in 12 weeks

Faced with the upcoming investment in React Native’s New Architecture, Shopify’s engineers experimented with AI coding agents to see if a direct move to native Swift and Kotlin was viable. A one‑week proof of concept showed that agents could quickly recreate screens, interactions, and flows from the RN reference, giving confidence to pursue a full migration.

Over 12 weeks, a core group built the native foundations while feature teams validated components. The team preserved user state, push notifications, and analytics events, retired redundant screens, and used the migration to simplify the app. Post‑migration measurements showed 23% faster iOS startup and 50% faster Android startup, session stability rose to 99.95%+, and the Android APK shrank by 109 MB.

Use AI agents to port features from React Native to SwiftUI/Jetpack Compose while preserving behavior and analytics

AI agents reduced the manual effort required to translate UI, state, and navigation logic between platforms.

The Tardis tool provided runtime feedback, enabling agents to verify parity in analytics and navigation without extensive manual QA.

Keeping feature parity at all times ensured a seamless user experience despite the underlying technology shift.

AI‑augmented development can make native rewrites feasible and fast, delivering performance gains without sacrificing feature parity

The native Shop app launched in the app stores with measurable performance improvements. Shopify continues to refine the app, using the migration as a baseline for further optimizations and has shared the workflow as a reusable extension for future AI‑assisted migrations.