I suspect we'll see a lot of large orgs doing this in the next year.

Perhaps. I can absolutely see that being more attractive especially with things like the Duo where, I assume, SwiftUI gives you a number of things "for free".

That said, the massive downsides to native are:

- App Store Review time, this used to be hours to 1-2 days, now it can take a week or more

- In the same vein, you can do updates without waiting on native when using web technologies to build your app. We can go from a bug in the field to a fix in <1hr easy. Try doing that with a native app

- Cross-platform, yes LLMs mean you can create a native iOS and Android app but you have to keep those in sync to say nothing of web (if you want to offer a web app as well)

- Like the point above: Web, if you want to support web, why not get the other platform for cheaper (shared logic)

Definitely makes sense for a large org with massive resources (such as Shopify) to do this. But for everyone here pondering what to use for their startup or a smaller project, there are still important trade-offs. In the past few years I've launched multiple cross-platform Flutter apps and multiple native iOS and Android apps using Jumpstart iOS and Android (native templates from the GoRails guys which leverage web views from your Jumpstart Rails server). The latter gave me web, iOS and Android out of the box and was vastly less costly to build, even with AI. For entrepreneurs who like Ruby on Rails, Jumpstart is my favorite for launching rapidly, and since the mobile apps are easy-to-modify iOS and Android projects, it's designed so you can either add more custom Hotwire Native Bridge Components or just write Swift and Kotlin to replace functionality with native code. Eventually you could write away all of the Jumpstart webview stuff, but you'd only do that if you had more runway, like if you have plenty of time or you start making lots of money. I've worked for clients whose ideas failed--not because of my code, of course. :)

It's better to find out quickly if you can get traction rather than building something requiring more maintenance. For most bug fixes or enhancements, you make them in the Jumpstart Rails side and they should up instantly in the mobile apps without going through app review again! Most projects are not being built in companies the size of Shopify, so I caution anyone who wants to just get the project out there to use platforms that give them more leverage. And no, I'm still not a fan of low-code or no-code, because I know what it's like to have to maintain apps over many years.

Oh, and I still always warn clients to stay away from native mobile unless they absolutely need it, because even with AI, maintaining just a web app is still light years faster, and far more pleasant. I know from very, very, very recent experience that testing subscriptions is still annoyingly cumbersome in the flaky Apple and Google sandbox environments, and Stripe for web apps is night and day easier to test. Testing on mobile is better than it used to be, but sometimes when I'm waiting for builds onto a physical device or for confusing settings in App Store Connect or Google Play Console to take effect (or just fine where they've been moved to), I think about how a manager 20 years ago was telling me how slowly his development lifecycle was when he used to burn software onto ROM chips. So web is still the way to go, and native mobile only if you absolutely have to. And if you have tons of time or money, sure, start with plain native.

Edit: As a web developer for decades, I still find both Jumpstart iOS/Android and Flutter to be preferable to React Native.

I’m surprised we aren’t seeing it more already. LLMs suddenly make it reasonable to maintain multiple native apps. I’d love to see this start to supplant Electron and its ilk on the desktop.