Scaling mobile commerce with uncompromised quality

Imagine a platform where Shopify merchants can effortlessly extend their online stores to mobile, creating a powerful, branded presence on the App Store and Google Play Store—an experience that’s as polished and fast as it is personalized and scalable.

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A seamless mobile experience for every brand

With Reactiv, we’ve given Shopify merchants the tools to launch their stores directly onto mobile apps, allowing them to connect with customers like never before. And the best part? Every app built on Reactiv is native, which means it’s fast, fluid, and delivers a user experience worthy of their brand. Built with React Native, our apps maintain the delightful snappiness and performance of a high-quality native app—no web views, no compromises, just a seamless experience.

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Scaling mobile with a seamless CI/CD pipeline

As we built Reactiv, we knew our journey couldn’t stop with just one or two mobile apps; we needed to scale to thousands of brands. Scaling effectively required serious investment in our CI/CD pipeline, which we designed to make building and releasing apps effortless at scale. We automated everything—from push notifications and app icons to splash screens, deep linking, and app configuration—ensuring that every merchant can roll out their mobile presence without manual intervention.

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CI/CD meets familiar developer workflows

Our CI/CD process leverages GitHub Actions, allowing us to build apps both in the cloud and on our hosted infrastructure. We wanted our developers to feel right at home, so we integrated workflows directly into the repositories they’re already working with, providing familiar, colocated tools. With each build, every relevant detail—timelines, logs, and progress—is displayed in our merchant dashboard, putting merchants in control of their mobile journey from start to finish.

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Between our merchant dashboard and our CI/CD workflows sits an orchestration layer we call the Build Service. This service listens for any changes merchants make to their mobile app’s configuration and automatically determines whether those changes can be applied dynamically or require a whole new version of the app to be released.

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In the latter case, the Build Service knows to trigger the appropriate GitHub Actions workflows and start collecting progress updates to share with the merchant. This first layer of automation in our build pipeline means apps start building the moment a change is made, rather than relying on intervention from support or development teams, all while greatly reducing both the chance of human error and the amount of sensitive information being passed around. Once the merchant has configured their app in our dashboard once, everything else is handled securely and automatically from then on.

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Launching on the App Store and Google Play Store has always been one of the biggest hurdles for any app developer. That’s why we’ve automated the deployment process using Fastlane, which allows us to seamlessly upload app bundles, giving merchants a frictionless path to go live on both platforms. No need for complicated setups or extra steps—just a smooth, guided launch process that we’re immensely proud of.

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At Reactiv, we’re not building a single in-house mobile app, and we’re not hosting a handful of copy-pasted merchant apps in our internal account – we’re building individual, fully customized apps for an infinite number of merchants, and deploying them where they belong: in the merchant’s account, where they retain full ownership. This presents some unique challenges, which Fastlane provides the perfect blend of functionality and flexibility to address.

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By combining standard Fastlane functionality with our own custom additions, every step of the build process is automated and, crucially, specific to the merchant app being built. From automatically creating icons fit for every device, bundling in Reactiv Clips, seamlessly managing merchant-specific app versioning and code signing – it’s never been easier, or quicker, for merchants to see their changes go live.

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Effortless scalability, powered by Reactiv

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At Reactiv, we’re not only delivering an uncompromised mobile experience but also a platform that scales without hesitation. Each component of our system, from automation in CI/CD to cloud builds, was built with one mission: to empower merchants at any scale to provide a mobile experience that’s fast, delightful, and distinctly their own.

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Here’s to a new chapter in mobile commerce, where Shopify merchants can connect with customers anywhere, at any time, on any device.

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Reactiv: scalable, powerful, and ready to elevate brands everywhere.

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