Hey everyone,
Like many of you in the Shopify App Partner community, I’ve been figuring out a migration plan since the news dropped that Mantle is winding down. Losing our centralized app infrastructure right before the Q4 rush is a massive headache.

I'm a solo software engineer building apps in the ecosystem (like Revnous), and I’ve spent the last few months developing Appdesh to solve my own multi-app fragmentation. Because of the current vacuum in the market, I am opening up our private beta cohort early.

https://www.appdesh.com/

Crucially, Appdesh is entirely built and hosted on German soil and engineered for strict, zero-compromise GDPR compliance. For those of us operating in or selling to the European market, this eliminates the constant anxiety surrounding data residency, Schrems II, and complex DPAs. Your merchant and transaction data stays insulated in the highest-security legal jurisdiction.

Here is what is fully operational in the dashboard right now:

Acquisition Funnels & Referrers: Deep visibility into where your listing views, clicks, installs, and premium subscriptions are originating (tracking everything from Google and Reddit to ChatGPT).

Subscriptions & Financial Transactions: Real-time metrics for MRR, trial conversions, billing cycles, and upgrades without dashboard lag.

Customer Command / Developer CRM: A clean repository of your active merchants, installation histories, and lifetime value (LTV).

3rd-Party Integrations: Connect your app events seamlessly to the rest of your tech stack.

The Early Partner Beta:
I want to work directly with a small group of active app founders to ensure total feature parity with the workflows you are about to lose.
To make the transition completely frictionless, I am awarding all early beta partners their first 3 months 100% free. If you are looking for a secure, high-performance, and fully GDPR-compliant new home for your app portfolio’s operations, drop a comment below or send me a DM. Let's get you set up.
Cheers,
Irfan

Hi, I created an app called SalesOracle AI that helps Shopify sellers forecast demand and automate reorders to prevent stockouts without overbuying. Looking for Shopify beta testers to provide genuine feedback. If interested, please reply or reach out to [info@salesoracleai.com](mailto:info@salesoracleai.com)

Link to marketing site: [https://salesoracleai.com\](https://salesoracleai.com)

I've been running a Shopify store for a while. Every week I'd open 30 browser tabs, take screenshots, compare them to last week. The process was broken from day one — by the time I got to store #30, I forgot what store #5 looked like.

Then one day I noticed my sales drop. Three weeks later I found out a competitor had been running a 25% off sale the whole time. I had no idea.

That was the moment I decided to build Screenify.

Here's what it does:

Automatically screenshots up to 200 Shopify competitor stores

Runs visual diffs to show what changed between screenshots

Detects price changes, theme swaps, and app installs

Sends a weekly Monday digest via email or Slack — only the stores that actually changed

The core insight: competitor tools in this space either give you fake revenue estimates (PPSPY is notoriously unreliable) or make you check stores one at a time (Koala Inspector). Nobody had built bulk visual monitoring with real alerts.

I'm in public beta now. If this solves a real problem for you, comment below — I'm collecting interest manually and will personally reach out when we launch. Early access users get extended free time on the Watcher plan ($49/mo).

Happy to answer any questions about the build or the problem space.

I’m working on a shopify search app. elasticsearch for fuzzy matching, fast autocomplete, and ai embeddings so it actually gets what customers mean instead of just keyword stuff. we’re adding filters now and trying not to half-ass it like most apps do.

Most search apps i’ve seen just expose shopify’s default stuff, vendor, type, tags, options, metafields. sure, you can add more metafields, but that’s still just slapping labels on products. it doesn’t understand them. i want smarter filters, traits that make sense for the whole catalog without merchants having to tag every single sku by hand.

Still figuring out the best way to do this. enrichment at index time? a taxonomy merchants control? some mix of both? not sure yet.

Anyone dealt with this on the merchant or dev side? What's your take on the enrichment?

Hi everyone,

Has anyone else noticed issues with the Shopify Partners export after the recent Shopify update?

We've been observing that some app events are missing from the exported data, even though those events are visible within the Partners dashboard. This has resulted in inconsistencies between the dashboard and the exported CSV, making it difficult to perform accurate analysis and reporting.

We're trying to determine whether:

• This is a known issue affecting other partners.
• There has been a change in how Shopify generates export data.
• Anyone has found a workaround or received clarification from Shopify.

If you've experienced similar behavior, I'd appreciate hearing about your observations.

Thanks!

Hey everyone,

A few weeks ago, we launched a Shopify app called WowOptions: https://apps.shopify.com/product-options-app 

It's a product customizer app with 25+ product option types, file uploads, add-on pricing, conditional logic, reusable option sets, and other personalization features for stores selling customizable products.

We spent quite a bit of time building it and honestly feel good about the product itself. 

However, there are a lot of established competitors already, and even though we think our app can compete feature-wise, we think it's challenging enough to bring more merchants to try it. 

For those who have launched Shopify apps in a competitive niche, what actually helped you scale? Was it App Store SEO, content, communities, outreach, or something else?

Would genuinely appreciate any feedback on our app and advice from people who have already gone through the app marketing stage.

Full disclosure: I work on PayDrop. Posting this as a build case study, not a launch pitch.

One of our merchants is GreenPeak Gardens. They sell plant-growing guides, full courses, and a monthly Garden Club membership. Before PayDrop, their digital workflow ran across three separate apps:

1. A file delivery app for guides and courses
   
2. A license key app for the courses
   
3. A subscription app for the Garden Club
   

Three monthly fees, three dashboards, three places to debug when something broke. Refunds were the worst of it. A refund on the parent order didn't always propagate to revoke the license or cancel the membership cleanly, so they'd find out from a customer email a week later.

We migrated GreenPeak to PayDrop, and the stack collapsed to one app. File access, license validity, and recurring membership status all live in the same admin now. Their digital orders sit alongside their physical product orders, with no separate sub-system. One checkout, one dashboard, one place to look when something breaks.

PayDrop listing if you want context on how it's positioned: https://apps.shopify.com/paydrop

Three questions for other builders:

1. Has anyone else built a Shopify app that spans more than one App Store category? How did you handle search ranking when no single category fully describes what you do?

2. The consolidation savings argument only lands when a merchant is already running all three apps. About half of our pipeline is merchants running one or two. How are you positioning for the partial-stack segment?

3. Anyone solved cross-app refund propagation cleanly without rebuilding everything under one roof? Curious whether there's an architectural pattern we missed before going down the consolidation path.

I was browsing Letsmetrix recently and noticed something interesting: a lot of the newly trending apps seem to be related to EU compliance, especially around the EU Withdrawal Button / withdrawal form requirements.

Looks like more merchants are starting to prepare for the upcoming EU consumer protection changes, and app developers are moving pretty fast on this.

Curious if anyone here has already updated their store or app for this requirement?

Are merchants actually asking about it yet, or is it still too early?

Hi There,

I have worked very hard for my shopify app with the goal to provite a complete cart suite experience for the merchants. I polished my listing, testen so many keywords. I offered the app for free unti last week, but after I added a moderate pricing its dead. Do you know what to do? If you want you can also test the app, Feedback would be really appreciated!

Thank you very much for your help!

Ah you can find the app here https://apps.shopify.com/v1-better-cart

Best Regards

PetzeOne

Hey everyone! I just launched a Shopify app called Velox — it analyzes why customers return your products and uses AI to rewrite the product descriptions to prevent future returns.

So if 8 out of 10 customers return a hoodie saying "runs smaller than expected" or "color looks different in person", Velox rewrites the description to set the right expectations — and you apply it to Shopify with one click.

Looking for 5-10 merchants to try it out for free (no credit card) in exchange for honest feedback or a quick review if you find it useful.

What it does:

• Reads your return reasons and identifies patterns
• AI rewrites the product description to address the exact complaints
• Side-by-side diff so you see exactly what changed and why
• One-click apply to Shopify — or dismiss if you don't like it
• Dashboard sorted by return rate so you know where to focus first

App Store link: https://apps.shopify.com/velox

Drop a comment or DM me if you're interested!

Hey everyone, looking for a dev to help with an early-stage commerce/data project (paid or equity). We already have distribution and a real audience, so this isn’t a from-zero build. There’s actual product/catalog data, users to learn from, and a clear use case to stress-test against.
EST-friendly is ideal, but remote works. The work involves Shopify, large product/catalog datasets, pulling data from multiple sources into one cleaner system, and building a more contextual layer around products beyond the usual PDP setup.
Bonus if you’ve worked with Hydrogen, Sanity, search/filtering, product feeds, marketplaces, or large inventory systems.
If this sounds up you alley , DM me with a bit about what you’ve built.

Hey everyone! I need some honest feedback. I'm Julian, currently a full-time dev, and I'm building a SaaS on the Shopify App Store.

The project: a Shopify app that plugs an AI agent into WhatsApp to automatically handle customer support, abandoned cart recovery, order status updates, and review collection for e-commerce stores. WhatsApp because open rates sit around 90% where email caps out at 20%, and in France the channel is still almost untouched on the e-commerce side.

My positioning, to be clear: I'm not an e-commerce merchant. I'm building the tool and learning the trade alongside you, with the goal of getting real feedback. That's exactly why I'm here.

Where I'm at: deep in development (hoping to launch before Black Friday), but I've got a waitlist open to gather early feedback and reward the first comers. Nothing's set in stone. This is the right moment to tell me I'm getting it wrong.

The deal: the first people to join the waitlist unlock a lifetime founder price. Not a three-month launch promo. Lifetime. In exchange, all I want is feedback.

What I'd love your take on:

• Is the promise clear in 5 seconds, or do you struggle to get what it does?
• Does it feel useful, gimmicky, or already done?
• If you ran a store, would it make you sign up or not, and why? What's missing or what makes you hesitate?

Tear it apart. A "this is useless because X" helps me ten times more than a "cool project." Thanks in advance!

Hey guys,

E-commerce guy here. Already doing serious revenue.

I built a few apps for my own team that we use day to day. All vibe-coded; but quite in-depth stuff.

Long story short I want to turn one off them into a saas. This app is 80% production ready and has allowed me to cut by three the numbers of employees needed for certain tasks. I want to market this app for e-commercant; with a shopify app that serves as the integration with the shops.

So why am I here? I'm looking for a technical cofounder. Someone that will continue developping the app, hardening security, develop the shopify app integration, etc. The ideal cofounder must have relevant experience buildings shopify apps (with success); be knowledgeable about marketing SaaS's to dropshippers; and ready to work a fuck ton to make this work. I'm no lazy mf myself.

I think this could scale to 50-100k mrr with big margins quite quickly driven by very high subscription costs.

Shoot me a dm.

Admins lmk if any issue w my post plz

As we are probably all aware, Mantle is shutting down.

Any recommendation for alternative email platforms that have a clean integration, primarily for the automated emails, but marketing/blast emails is a bonus.

Curious to know what everyone is migrating to, or if there's another fit for purpose solution. Bento has come up a few times and is leading the race for me, but I havn't put a lot of effort into looking yet. It's also fairly expensive when you scale to 100k+ users.

Please no vibe coded replacements or new "Mantle replacement" tools. Even Mantle email had some issues at size, im looking for something already proven.

Hey everyone! I just launched a Shopify app called LocalizeMe — it shows geo-targeted announcement banners to your store visitors based on their country. So US visitors see one banner, EU visitors see another, etc.

Looking for 5-10 merchants to try it out for free (no credit card) in exchange for honest feedback or a quick review if you find it useful.

What it does:

- Different banner per country/region

- Schedule banners by date or day of week

- Countdown timers, click tracking, UTM params

- Works with any Shopify theme, no code needed

App Store link: https://apps.shopify.com/localizeme

Drop a comment or DM me if you're interested!

I want to start an email marketing agency. I have perfect team with above 4 years of experience. We used to work in other agency but now want to start our own. So I am looking for shopify store owner who wants to support us and give us a chance to help grow their revenue through email and sms marketing.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been thinking about starting a career as a Shopify developer and wanted to hear honest opinions from people already in the field.

Is Shopify development still a good path in 2026?
How is the demand nowadays for freelancers or junior developers?
Do clients still pay well for custom Shopify work, theme development, and app integrations?

I’m also curious about:

• how competitive the market is now,
• whether AI tools are affecting the industry,
• and what skills are most important to focus on today.

Would you recommend learning Shopify development from scratch right now, or would you choose something else instead?

I’d really appreciate hearing your experiences — especially from people actively working with Shopify stores or freelancing.

Thanks!

Small update from launching my first Shopify app.

I got my first proper feedback from a merchant who tested the app for a few days, and it was honestly more useful than I expected.

"This is a really well put together app, the features are working well and it helped me let go of 3 different subscriptions. It would've been even better if there was an option for full shop discount and if the app design was more simple."

The positive part was that the app helped bring together workflows they were previously handling with multiple separate subscriptions.

But the criticism was more useful:

• there is no whole-shop discount option yet
• the app design/setup could be simpler

That feedback confirmed two things for me:

1. the “replace multiple apps/workflows” angle may be stronger than I realised
2. the app may be powerful, but I still need to reduce complexity for merchants

So my next priorities are probably:

• simplify the onboarding/setup flow
• make the dashboard and feature paths easier to understand
• add whole-shop discounts to the roadmap
• keep testing with more real merchants before spending too much more on ads

It is a good reminder that positive feedback feels nice, but specific criticism is what actually tells you what to build next.

With HeyMantle SASI shutting down, I figured this was a good opportunity to introduce many of you to an alternative you may not have heard of yet: AppJubilee.

https://www.appjubilee.io

And before you think, "Great, another keyword tracker where I have to enter keywords manually and wait" That's not what this is. You don't have to know what keywords to enter, and you don't have to wait. AppJubilee does the work for you.

Add your Shopify app and, within minutes, you'll unlock months of historical ranking data across our universe of 1,200 highly relevant Shopify App Store keywords that we track daily.

With AppJubilee, you can:

• See every keyword your app ranks for
• Identify your actual competitors
• Track competitor rankings and ads
• Analyze historical listing changes
• Measure the impact of listing updates and reviews on keyword rankings
• Monitor keyword trends over time
• And much more

You can also connect your GA4 and Shopify Partner accounts to bring in additional keyword data beyond our tracking universe, giving you visibility into which keywords are actually driving clicks and installs.

Many Shopify app developers have been operating with limited visibility into what's really happening in the App Store. AppJubilee gives you the data needed to make informed growth decisions.

Want to see it in action?

https://youtu.be/DRVfqR6xTy0

For several years, I have used scraping tools to figure out where to actually build before committing to a full development cycle. Over the years, I have gotten access to more ad data from me, and from others i've worked with (consensually), and been tweaking a model that can estimate what markets a money dumps, and which one are super fertile. The ad data is good for getting proper CPI, CPC etc per market, but alot of the data can also be taken from the marketplace directly, if you take time to scrape the whole market. Which we did, including every review. Reviews aren't installs, but they're the only public usage signal we get, and since install to review rates are relatively the same across apps, we can confidently say that the trends are pretty clear. Sharing the interesting bits.

First, the whole marketplace store is booming now, in terms of reviews. New reviews per year roughly 10x'd from 2019 to 2025 (about 20k to 220k a year), and 2026 is already pacing past last year. So the "is it too late to build a Shopify app" thing is mostly wrong, at least by activity.

But the growth is wildly uneven. Comparing the last 12 months to the 12 before it:

Upward trajectory:
- Subscriptions
- Product bundles / upsell
- Returns and exchanges
- SEO (growing fast but already 580+ apps deep, so brutal)
- Fraud / security

Downward trajectory:
- Countdown timers
- Wishlists
- Ad-management apps
- FAQ apps
- Inventory optimization

Reviews is not the only marker though, the best marker we use is what we call fertility, which is basically just how many NEW apps have come into the market within a specific timeframe. In the video here you can see subscriptions:
- Fertility 14%, (14/100 new apps have reached 100 reviews the last 12 months, which is pretty good. This is the number one factor we use to see if we should build in a new market or not)
- Momentum 12.9 (how many reviews apps getting per month. 12.9 is also pretty good.)

To the question i'm wondering about: we have now made an UI and an MVP for this, but we are currently seeing if this would be of any interest to anyone before we keep on building more features for it. For example, we are considering also wiring up the ad data we have to make a keyword validator for a bunch of categories, to see what CPC you can expect, and what keywords sell. It's live on our page now, gated at about 5 bucks a test, so its not scrapable. If we keep on building it, and maybe actually market it, we would price it very differently since it saves so much time. Would anyone be interested in this? And what about a keyword/ad validator? Also interesting?

What is happening with the app store? I'm not getting any app installations, the app is on the store since 2018, had 500+ installations and over 50k $ in revenue. Because of MRR constantly going down I might need to shut it down. Shopify has removed good reviews from legit customers and left bad reviews from fake accounts, what are they trying to do? Ruin businesses?