Shopify went back to native. I think the bigger shift is formal verification

The social media discourse is ablaze with people porting apps from slower dynamic languages to faster statically compiled languages. And we've seen both Shopify and Coinbase start switching away from React Native back to native mobile apps. What's changed, and what's next for programming ecosystems? I think the answer is less about performance than it first looks. Why did people use cross platform frameworks? When modern smartphones first came out, there was an explosion in native app development. Cross platform web apps on smartphones were (and to be honest, still are in many respects) limited in terms of the features and quality of UX you could deliver to users. This involved most companies having to build totally separate app codebases, one per platform. Typically you'd have a Swift (previously Objective-C) iOS app and a Java/Kotlin Android app. For many teams, this is a huge headache. Not only do you require ~twice the resources, building everything twice, but coordinating feature…