- Sources: primary, discussion
- Summary: Mustafa Ali states Shopify is rebuilding the Shopify, Shop, Point of Sale and Inbox apps natively, because coding agents lowered the cost of building the same feature twice. React Native Skia is sponsored through the end of 2026, William Candillon will fork the repository in the coming months and publish it under a new name, and the original repository is archived when that transition completes, FlashList keeps critical compatibility fixes at about 2 million downloads per week while Shopify negotiates long-term stewardship, and Restyle is archived and stops being maintained after 2026. The post states the Shop app went from proof of concept to shipped native app in 12 weeks with AI assistance, and separately describes a checkpoint system called Helix, illustrated with the Shopify app, in which each slice must pass tests, match the running app in visual review, survive two adversarial code reviewers and get human approval before the next slice starts.
- Why it matters: Shopify was the largest public production reference for React Native, and the reversal changes who maintains three libraries other teams depend on.
- Follow-up: Who takes long-term stewardship of FlashList, and the name Skia is republished under.
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