Issue 235 - Before the Rush: CLI 4.0, Expiring Tokens, and What's New on the Platform

Shopify Integrates with v0, Replit, and Manus AI for Vibe-Coded Store Building

Harley Finkelstein announces Shopify integrations with v0, Replit, and Manus AI — three AI-powered building tools. The pitch: describe your business, these tools build it, connect to Shopify and you're selling. Shopify is positioning itself as the commerce layer for the next generation of founders who build through natural language rather than traditional code.

By Harley Finkelstein

What I Learned Moving a Shopify App to Expiring Access Tokens — Four Gotchas Worth Knowing

Farid Movsumov (Craftshift) migrated his app to expiring access tokens well ahead of the January 2027 deadline and documented four non-obvious bugs.

By Farid Movsumov

Shopify Rollouts Now Supports Scheduling, Gradual Publish, and A/B Testing Themes

Shopify's Rollouts feature now lets you schedule, gradually roll out, and A/B test entire themes and checkout/customer account configurations. You can schedule a theme switch to go live at a specific date and time, temporarily swap themes with automatic revert, roll out to a percentage of visitors, or run a true A/B test between two different themes or checkout setups. A significant upgrade for merchants managing seasonal campaigns or major redesigns.

By Shopify

App Home UI Extensions: Build App Landing Pages Without a Backend

Shopify now supports App Home UI extensions — a hosted alternative to the traditional iframe model that lets you build your app's main landing page as a Preact UI extension with no backend server required. Liam Griffin (Shopify dev advocate) flagged this as a massive update for custom app developers. It's currently aimed at custom-distribution apps that don't need server-side logic; the iframe model with React Router remains the recommended path for most apps.

By Liam Griffin

Shopify CLI 4.0: What to Fix in Your CI/CD Before --force Breaks Your Pipeline

Shopify CLI 4.0 (shipped May 21, 2026) removes the --force flag from `shopify app deploy` and `shopify app release` — any CI/CD pipeline still using it will break. The replacement is two granular flags: --allow-updates for safe automated deploys (no deletions) and --allow-deletes for manual runs when you've confirmed what's being removed.

By Weaverse

3 Shopify ShopifyQL Reports That Surface Performance Issues Hidden in Blended Averages

The default Shopify CWV dashboard shows blended averages that can make a site look healthy while specific devices or pages are bleeding. This post walks through three custom ShopifyQL queries in Shopify Analytics — LCP/INP by device type, by page type, and by specific URL ranked by traffic volume — with copy-paste queries ready to run in the Report Explorer. The device split alone surfaced a 25% desktop LCP gap at a 9-figure DTC brand that wasn't visible anywhere in the standard reports.

By BS DevShop

SDA DotDev Toronto City Guide

ShopDev Alliance put together a free Toronto city guide for DotDev attendees. It's an interactive map and list of recommendations for the conference — restaurants, neighborhoods, things to do. Worth bookmarking if you're making the trip to DotDev in Toronto.

By ShopDev Alliance

Shopify Outage [Resolved] — HN Discussion

A Shopify outage thread on Hacker News (101 points) that sparked a broader debate about platform dependency. The outage itself was resolved, but the discussion surfaced recurring frustrations: Shopify's control over what merchants can sell, restrictions on third-party apps, and comparisons to the Amazon seller experience. Worth reading for the developer community sentiment around platform risk.

By Hacker News