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Comment by hackernud3s

11 hours ago

I don't see why you would, unless your argument for your whole career has been that LLMs make this easy.

13 comments

hackernud3s

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hectdev  10 hours ago

My argument is that platform specific codebases is the right course of action. My point is that consumers can tell, the product is better, and developers are happier working on native codebases.

  • makeitdouble  10 hours ago

    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.

    • hectdev  10 hours ago

      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.

  • hackernud3s  8 hours ago

    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.

  • ronsor  10 hours ago

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

  • colesantiago  10 hours ago

    > 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"?

    • hectdev  10 hours ago

      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.

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