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Comment by meisel | Hacker News Reader

How did Shopify choose between React Native and Flutter?

Shopify acquired Tictail, a Swedish e-commerce company that had their flagship app written in React Native. They worked on porting Shopify’s Shop app to React Native, with great success. Subsequently, a 12-16 week experiment took place during which a small team explored rewriting one of the larger apps in both Flutter, then React Native. React Native was settled on primarily due to pre-existing knowledge of React and React Native in the company.

They bet hard on React ecosystem (for example, they accquired Remix).

People are afraid of Dart.

For the record, I think Dart is fantastic and really nothing to fear at all.

Flutter isn’t native, React Native is.

React Native isn’t native. It uses native UI components, but the application code is still just interpreted JavaScript, not a native application.

https://reactnative.dev/docs/javascript-environment

Yes, but you can write and integrate the platform APIs for UO components. You can’t do that in flutter.

Platform channels - https://docs.flutter.dev/development/platform-integration/pl...

Flutter compiles code to native and RN uses JavaScript as a bridge to communicate.

Sure but the pixels painted to the screen and the gestures handled by the application code are all the platform’s native UI framework. Knowledge of the underlying platform UI framework is transferable.

In React Native if something is slow or you want to use a recently-released native platform feature you can write a native component. That’s possible with Flutter too, but if you mix Flutter & native views, there’s a bunch of performance issues due to texture copies and thread synchronization.

UO components?

UI, oops

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