Shopify’s Shop app is consistently at the top of the shopping category in the App Store. It’s also the first Shopify app to be rebuilt from scratch with AI assistance. The team went from proof of concept to a fully native, published app in twelve weeks. Twelve. And they did it by walking away from React Native, the cross-platform bet Shopify made in 2020. That bet wasn’t a mistake. It saved them a ton of time building features once, let developers with no mobile background contribute, and removed the constant chase for feature parity. But coding agents changed the economics of mobile development. When AI can write Swift and Kotlin as fast as it can write React Native, the main reason to accept cross-platform tradeoffs starts to evaporate. Shopify also open-sourced libraries along the way that became top choices in their categories, which is a nice bonus. But the real news is narrower and more interesting: a small team rebuilt a production app used by millions in a quarter of a ...