You're looking at it from iOS side only, and for a US company that would be the last platform they'd ever drop.

It was a different picture out of the Apple garden, when a company only brings their next major feature to iOS because they couldn't be bothered to hire the same headcount on two development teams and their CEO uses an iPhone anyway.

We had that discussion about a decade ago with a company rep that didn't realize 70% of their EU users were on Android yet their play store app didn't have the feature they were planning to promote.

Basically, better was the enemy of good for most companies.

Correct, I advocated for the solution that produced the best outcome for user experience, code and architecture simplicity, and prevented having to rewrite an app in the future in native. Which has been validated here.

The android shortfall is a real one but I also pushed for hiring native android developers too.

As someone who has watched a team battle Xamarin and now Maui, and all the painful upgrades in between, I agree with you. Sure they never had the pain of supporting two separate codebases, but they also never had the luxury of doing anything the easy way.

We'll have to wait and see if the extra maintenance / bugs / attack surface is justified. This an announcement of future direction so vindicated is certainly premature.

They're right when it makes business sense, which is also about cost and why Shopify didn't do it before.

I'm not arguing the business sense. Two sides can be right which is why I advocated for native development. Which is vindicated here.

If you weren't arguing against the business case, what were you arguing with the C-level types about? I don't think I have ever heard a case for react that wasn't centered around shared codebases mean fewer resources/cost/time to deliver a feature.

Because someone needs to be in the room to show the “make the most money with the least resources” people that there are more variables to consider.

In other words your team also resigned the next day ?

> developers are happier working on native codebases.

Agents are happier working on any codebase, but ultimately Shopify and other companies want iOS native app level quality without the huge cost of hiring many native iOS / Android devs.

LLMs and Agents deliver on getting a native app out at lower cost, higher quality, faster all at once.

I think everyone is trying to tell you your skills as an iOS native dev have been commoditised and Shopify and others don't need to hire anymore native devs to find this out.

I don't see how your job being completely commoditised and cannibalised by LLMs replacing your job is some how vindication?

This is just like saying "we won the argument", but what did you actually "win"?

Yea, I hear that. I'm content with winning the argument and truthfully, I think they will find they need to hire iOS engineers because we do more than write Swift. There are whole ecosystems of knowledge to go from a product idea, sit in meetings with many stakeholders, and implement the actual thing everyone wants. All they got here was a 1-to-1 implementation of their current app which was born of engineers working through real constraints. It says nothing of new features that have to play nice with other pillars of the company.

> I think they will find they need to hire iOS engineers because we do more than write Swift.

Shopify isn't hiring any mobile engineers.

Probably because the agents were hired first and took the job already.

That is the point of the job being literally commoditized and cannibalised, they hire less or close to 0.

Your quixotic 'vindication' means nothing and has the opposite effect.

Not sure why you are defining my vindication. Its purely rooted in native is the better solution for mobile apps. Which they are using. Not sure how that makes it the opposite.