Hi I’m building a Platform as a Service App, which gives merchant an AI agent to help them build and deploy their own Custom Apps. It’s like Heroku for Custom Apps.
Today merchants are already doing this, they are vibe coding custom apps with Sidekick or even asking Claude or any coding agent to do something for them and then deploy to Vercel/Cloudflare with a Database in Supabase or any other provider. Often probably without knowing most of the stuff the agent is doing, yet, they create the app and start using it in their store.
My app gives a harness specifically for Shopify so it guides the merchant to build the app following the best practices but also it host the backend for them, gives them a database, analytics engine, version control, plus a bunch of other built-in security features. Again, think of Heroku to vibe code custom apps.
For example if you say “build me an app that allows me to show a survey in my PDP, I want to store the results in a DB or put them as line item properties” .. it will help you create the custom app, generate an app block, provision a backend with a database, create the db with the right shape for the data you are collecting, and finally deploy the backend and shopify custom app for you.
Because the app requires people to create a custom app, my application has been paused and there is no way to appeal or explain to the App Store review team (I left comments explaining this).
Can we get some guidance or Shopify’s policy on this type of apps. Technically my platform does not require a Shopify App since we only provide the infrastructure (similar to Heroku/Vercel/Gadget/Replit/etc) but we want to offer an integrated experience for merchants.