Hello, I have an app that builds themes for merchants and allows them to upload them straight to the store.
This app initially went through app certification without any feedback, but recently had a reviewer raise a point, that it does not comply with this: App Store requirements requirement.
My app has themes access scope and api exceptions.
Anyone else encountered this?
What does this mean?
Does your app allow customers to upload built Shopify themes to Shopify theme store?
I believe this is against their requirement.
My app builds the theme and uploads it to the merchants store directly. That’s strange if that’s the case, because app passed initial certification and there’s bunch of other apps that do it, so not sure why it got picked on in the recent quality re-check.
Hi @Rokas_Va
It’s hard to give the best advice without knowing the full context, but if your app creates and installs a new theme onto a store, you likely should be using the theme store for distribution (and also ensuring you meet theme requirements).
Hi @Liam-Shopify , thanks for you reply.
The flow works as follows: the merchant provides inputs in the app, we generate a complete theme based on those inputs, and the merchant then has an explicit action to upload that theme to their store.
This exact flow passed the initial app review, which is why we continued building on it and invested heavily in improving both this flow and other functionality. The concern was only raised later, after the app started getting traction.
What makes this difficult to understand is that there are multiple public apps in the App Store that appear to follow a very similar approach, including some that have BFS status, so it’s not obvious where the line is or what changed.
I’m not trying to argue policy here — I’m just looking for clarification and help. If this behaviour is no longer acceptable, it would be really helpful to understand what the compliant alternative is, or whether this needs escalation to the policy team for clarification.
Thanks for explaining this a bit more. Curious to learning why you creating a complete theme? Would it be possible to add theme app extensions to an existing theme instead, which would likely be a better experience for merchants?
App acts as a “theme builder” of sorts, so it seemed easier and way more seamless to just build the theme based on user inputs and upload it in full rather than trying to go extensions route, especially when others do it too. Having a subpar experience, where user has to do even a couple more steps to get to the results compared to competition would put as at a disadvantage, hence we went with this approach.
To be honest I’m not entirely sure how it would work if it’d be theme app extension. Would we get full control over the sections, copy they have, colors etc? Because we promise merchants to get complete them a complete theme so they can start selling asap.