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
Btw, it’s not only the app. As an user of the admin, when I’m an a small laptop screen it’s really an annoyance. Either it sits at the bottom of the screen, or take a full column on the right. Wherever it is, it occupies useless space.
On a small screen space is gold.
No ways to just remove it from the screen.
In my opinion, in addition of what was said before, it’s also a problem for users.
Without saying that as an app developer, I tried to integrate with sidekick. But sidekcik is so terrible that I don’t see a good use case for it.
This is causing a customer support nightmare for us - Folks are using sidekick expecting it to interface with our app, which it does not.
Using the admin on the desktop browser, when sidekick is opened as a right panel, if I make my browser window smaler, at a certain size sidekick is taking over all the space.
Before resizing to a small screen it’s a right column:
Sizing down the window, it becomes full screen:
I understand that this is the small screen layout and I can close by pressing the cross in the top right hand corner, but still it’s a serious problem. I’m trying to get it away from me but it’s constantly coming back.
For whoever is often switching window size this is a nightmare, like people using a tiling desktop manager, or just opening the dev tools on a side panel.
To be honest it feels like having a booger on one finger: you try to remove it, and somehow it ends up on another finger. You just can’t get rid of it (sorry but it’s the best analogy I could think of).
Encouraging users to interact with a language model for even the simplest tasks consumes resources and creates a frustrating experience for merchants and their staff.
App developers have limited control over its responses, yet our credibility suffers when those responses are unreliable.
Shopify does not need to change constantly. Merchants and app developers would benefit more from a stable platform and reliable tools than another layer of AI in routine workflows.
Thank you all for sharing your concerns about the recent change to how Sidekick appears in the Shopify admin. I’ll update this thread as soon as I have more information about next steps.
FYI @Paige-Shopify - the complaints are still rolling in. Sidekick is completely blocking some buttons in our application. I had a store tell me this morning how frustrating it was that they can’t move it (I told them how they can click the side button) and how frustrating it was to try and use our application when our buttons are covered. You guys need to give a solution to this that doesn’t force a re-design on apps:
reconsider this feature