But here's the thing, across operating systems the products should not be identical.

When you get to the point that your have a significant enough number of users across multiple platforms, generalizing everything into a shared UX doesn't make sense; giving those classes of users the best experience requires embracing their platform.

A simple example: Android has a system-wide convention for a `back` button. iOS has no such standard. Users on each platform have different expectations for how to navigate an app fundamentally, and holding tightly onto the concept of identical gives both camps a compromised experience.

> keeping those two products that need to be identical in sync

I agree that most companies do that, but in my opinion that's not really all that important. Some drift between the iOS and Android apps should be expected and accepted.

This is a great point that I wish the Shopify article went into in more depth! Would love to hear if they considered this

Agree to a point, but human resource is literally the main cost in most businesses, so there's that

Conway's law also plays a big part here and it's kind of TBD to see if agentic development will minify or magnify its effects

Very true, especially when there are different turn around times and review policies for the various app stores, things can get out of sync quickly

Assuming they have a robust feature flag and experiment pipeline in place they are trying to solve a much more complicated version of this

> it is in the product and organizational challenges of keeping those two products that need to be identical in sync.

They're two different platforms where the capabilities and UI patterns differs, so I don't see why they should be in sync. The web platform is not in sync with them. And using native features can give you a nice boost in maintenance and speed, unlike React Native where you always needs to align library semantics.