Hey all,
I’m unable to locate the development preview options for theme extensions in the partner dashboard. This is very frustrating as apparently the dev dashboard UI has been updated, so anything in the support docs is stale.
See Can’t find “Developer Preview” toggle for extensions in new Shopify Dev Dashboard for more info.
For context, we need to pass an app review and are unable to test the extension (which was working a couple of weeks ago…).
Let me know how else I can help here. Happy to provide more information.
Hi @amullick
You shouldn’t need a dev preview store for testing theme extensions, but you enable dev preview features now when you create a store from the dev dashboard:
Hey amullick, yeah this is a known pain point right now. The old Partner Dashboard had that “Development store preview” toggle right on the extension page, but in the new Dev Dashboard it’s either been moved or temporarily removed during the migration. Multiple developers have hit this same wall and there’s no clear answer from Shopify yet on where it went.
What I’d try in the meantime is skipping the dashboard toggle entirely and going through the CLI. Running shopify app dev with the --store flag pointed at your dev store will spin up a local dev server and let you preview the theme extension directly in your store’s theme editor. You can also pass --theme to target a specific theme if you need to test against something other than Dawn ( app dev ). It’s not the same one click experience the dashboard toggle gave you, but functionally it gets you to the same place for testing. I’ve run into similar situations with clients at Stacksync where Shopify’s dashboard changes break an existing workflow and the CLI ends up being the more reliable path anyway.
For the app review side specifically, make sure you’ve done a full shopify app deploy and not just local dev, because the review system checks the deployed version, not what you’re running locally. If the extension shows up in the deploy output and the review still fails, I’d open a ticket with Shopify Partner support referencing your app ID and the deploy version. The community thread you linked has other developers stuck on the same thing so its likely something Shopify needs to address on their end.
Hope this helps.
Thanks, that’s super helpful!
