Issue 229 - Surprising Insights from our Shopify Developer Survey Results

Liquid Weekly's Shopify Developer Survey Results

A few weeks ago we conducted a Shopify Developer Survey - thank you to everyone who took time to respond. As promised today I'll be sharing the results. I'm going to stay focused on what you told me about yourselves and what you're working through right now, because I think that's the part that's actually interesting to read. Who you are The single biggest group reading this newsletter is freelance and independent developers, at around 30% of respondents. Agency developers came in second, followed by in-house developers at brands, and then a larger-than-I-expected contingent of app developers and founders. There are also a handful of agency owners, Shopify employees, and at least one merchant who described themselves as "just trying to keep up with what my devs are doing." GRAPH Geographically, the US leads the pack (37% of respondents), followed by Western Europe (21%), the UK (13%), and Canada (13%). Australia and New Zealand, India, and Eastern Europe each had a small but real presence, and Latin America showed up for the first time. GRAPH On the DotDev front: 28% of you are heading to Toronto in July. Thirty-eight more said they want to go but can't make it. That gap between interest and attendance tells its own story about how spread out this community actually is. What's on your mind The topics you most want to see covered fell into a pretty clear order. AI tools and workflows came first, with ~50% of respondents flagging it. Theme development was close behind at 49%, followed by building and monetising apps (46%), Shopify Plus and B2B (38%), and then marketing and business content (32%). GRAPH That AI number is high, but the open-ended responses added important texture to it. What people actually want is practical: how other developers are using these tools in real work, specific workflows, concrete examples. A few people went out of their way to say they're already drowning in AI hype and appreciate that Liquid Weekly has stayed grounded. So the appetite is there, but it comes with a clear preference for substance over noise. Theme development sitting at number two makes complete sense given the readership. Most of you are doing this work day to day. The frustration with Shopify's communication (or lack of it) around theme development came through clearly in the challenges section too, which I'll get to in a moment. The marketing and business content figure is the one I found most interesting. Thirty-two percent of respondents flagged it, and when I dug into the open-ended answers, the same theme kept coming up across freelancers in particular. The development side of the work is getting commoditised, and the harder problem now is finding good clients, positioning yourself, and building something sustainable. Who could have imagined such a change even just a few years ago! What you actually want to read When I asked about content formats, platform news and changelogs came out on top - I'll never live that one down with Taylor and our ongoing joke about the length of his changelog updates on our podcast. Real-world case studies and code snippets both scored higher than tutorials, and I think that's significant. The ask isn't for more beginner content or high-level overviews. It's for specific, practical, this-is-how-I-actually-solved-it content. The kind of stuff that's hard to find in the official docs (and harder to write!) GRAPH Business and freelancing advice scored higher than I expected too, consistent with the topics data. Forty two percent said they find it valuable, which is a bigger slice of the readership than I've historically been writing for. The challenges I asked an open-ended question about what you're struggling with, and the answers clustered around a few themes. Keeping up with the pace of change is the dominant one. Shopify moves fast, and several people mentioned that the frequency of breaking changes has gotten harder to manage. One response put it well: "Shopify keeps drastically changing things, making it impossible to do things on the side. Remix to React Router, API to GraphQL, Partners to Dev Dashboard..." These changes make it hard for individual developers in particular The second theme is AI-related anxiety, though it's more nuanced than a simple fear of being replaced. Several people described a feeling of uncertainty about how to calibrate their investment in new tools, how to advise clients, and how to keep up without losing focus on the core work. One person wrote: "everything's a lot less certain than it seemed a year or two ago." That's probably the most honest summary of where a lot of the community is at right now. I know I feel it personally. Client and work acquisition came up repeatedly among freelancers, sometimes framed explicitly as a consequence of AI lowering the floor on development work. Finding quality clients, standing out, and knowing how to price work in a shifting market were all mentioned. Thank you for taking the time. Knowing who's on the other end of this makes it a lot easier to figure out what's worth writing about. If anything in these results sparked a thought, hit reply. I read everything. EVERYTHING! Karl

By Karl Meisterheim