From April 2025 apps must use GraphQL

Partner Discussions
1

Good morning,

I would like to find a bit more clarity on the Starting April 2025, new public apps submitted to Shopify app store must use GraphQL — Shopify developer changelog announcement.

I had previously inquired about it and got the following response from Niall (quoting only part of it):

After checking with our Partner Specialist team, if a Partner account is created even on March 31st and created a public draft app in REST but wanted to submit it for review on April 1st, they would be rejected as only apps built in GraphQL submitted for review after April 1st will be considered. Custom apps already built in REST before April 1st can continue to be used but any custom apps created after April 1st will need to use GraphQL.

I just wanted to confirm / double-check the last part: is it true that even if our Partners Account exists prior to April 1st, if I add a new custom app to it after April 1st, the app will only be allowed to use GraphQL API even if in draft mode?

If that’s true, to help us with transitioning from REST to GraphQL (i.e. buy us a bit more time), could we just create a number of custom apps in our existing Partner Account prior to April 1st, and let our developers use them during development, to keep our app working with REST until we migrate it fully to GraphQL?

Thanks,
Piotr

2

Hi Piotr,

If your partner account exists prior to April 1st 2025, you’ll be able to create custom apps that use our REST API after April 2025.

However, this does not apply to the REST Product API deprecation however (which is where the confusion might have been). The REST API endpoints for /products and /variants will be deprecated for custom apps on April 1st 2025.

But if your creating custom apps that don’t rely on /products and /variants REST endpoints you can create them after April 1st, in the same way they work today.