Shopify and Notion are moving back to native. A former SwiftUI engineer: all bugs are bridging bugs.
Three posts on X this week. Put them next to each other and they start to look like one story.
Someone at Shopify said the Shop App has already moved back to native — Swift and Kotlin, about twelve weeks. Faster launch, far fewer crashes, Android package more than a hundred megabytes smaller. The original wording was move back. That means they went cross-platform in the middle, and now they have moved back.
Mustafa Ali (@mustafa01ali)
Shopify Engineering illustration
Around the same time, Notion's Ji Pei posted a phone recording: they are rebuilding the native mobile app. Still early, but the comments already blew up. People are listing what hurts about Notion on a phone today.
Ji Pei (@iampgzp) phone recording
Kyle Macomber used to work on SwiftUI. He quoted the Shopify post and mentioned an internal joke:
all bugs are bridging bugs
Put a declarative layer on top of UIKit, and update timing plus the edge cases are hard to line up. He said it would only be harder on the React Native side.
Kyle Macomber (@kylemacomber)
The three posts were not coordinated. The direction is the same: the layer people touch every day is starting to be worth the native bill.
Cross-platform used to be fast. One team, two platforms — that was the point. Once the product got big, slow starts, crashes, fat packages, and wrong gestures started driving people away. Then the "one codebase" math looks different.
This is not a call to kill cross-platform tomorrow. Admin screens, campaign pages, internal tools — cross-platform still pays. What changed is that the core app is getting harder to phone in.
Shopify already turned in a paper with numbers. Notion is still writing. The bridge is still there. More people are just finding out — a bridge is not a home.