It seems the new layout put a extremely invasive sidekick on top of our app.
Our app has no integration with sidekick so all this accomplishes is:
- Confuse and distract customers
- Imply sidekick can build the same functionality for free
“presence without imposition”
I just raised the same points a hour or so ago, great minds think alike!
Could we have an option to disable the Sidekick popup entirely?
There are two main issues with it from an app developer’s perspective:
Less technical merchants are likely to assume the popup is part of the app they’re using (quite fairly, as its directly within the app…). That creates a real risk of confusion, support requests, or complaints when Sidekick doesn’t behave the way they expect the app itself to behave.
Shopify regularly asks app developers to make overlays, prompts and promotional UI dismissible. This is something I’ve had raised multiple times during BFS reviews for autoBlogger. So it feels a bit inconsistent for Sidekick to place a persistent, non-dismissible popup directly over an app’s interface.
The fact app developers had zero heads up on quite a disruptive UI change is pretty disappointing. Our UI now has elements hidden behind this floating chat bar, so we’re left trying to work around something we didn’t know was coming.
It’s ironic because if we shipped a floating, non-dismissible bar that covered functionality, I can’t imagine it getting through a BFS review. Why is that suddenly fine when it’s Shopify’s UI covering ours?
Surely changes like this need some notice and a chance for developers to test before they land in front of merchants. At the very least, let merchants dismiss it.
This is honestly making me so mad right now. I’ve already gotten a couple of support requests because the Sidekick UI is literally covering parts of my app UI and blocking clickable elements. How is this even acceptable? It’s unbelievable.
Please, please, please give us an option to disable or hide this. This is absolutely a bug from an app developer’s perspective, because it’s interfering with and blocking our UI. We really need an option to turn this off.
Yeah, this is poor form to put Sidekick on top of our apps without any ability for it to interact with the apps at all. Confusing as hell for users too. “OH hey, Sidekick now works with this app!” No… it doesn’t… at all.
what scares me is that sidekick is genuinely bad. I played with it for some advanced use case around app, and to me it is still at an early stage product. Which would be ok if it was not sitting in front of the apps.
Right now it will be used more and more by non-technical merchants who can’t gauge its answers…
Hopefully people complain and shopify will take smart actions to improve this.
I have nothing further to add, but commenting for increased visibility as the ability to hide this should be a given.
Just to add. It shouldn’t be in the middle of the screen. Shopify already has the sidebar - you could have put it there instead. My apps UI was hidden behind sidekick because of this issue and the workarounds don’t seem very promising.
I was angry at Admin UI Extension and its mystery max height but this is worse 
you can click the last icon, it says Open sidekick and it will open in the right panel