Hello Shopify Community,
We are currently building a SEO partner app that is still under development, and we need to test some of its core features—specifically social meta tags and Page Speed, SEO previews, and search engine visibility. These features cannot be fully evaluated on a development store because development stores are password protected, which prevents accurate SEO and social sharing previews.
To complete proper testing, we have purchased a live Shopify store solely for testing purposes. However, our app is still in development mode (public, not yet submitted), and Shopify does not allow installation of development-mode public apps on paid live stores.
We would like to know:
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Is there an approved method to temporarily install a development-stage public app on a live store for SEO testing purposes?
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Can we temporarily convert our development app to a Custom App, install it on the live store for testing, and later switch it back to Public mode before submitting for review?
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If there are any Shopify-approved alternatives for testing SEO-related features without submitting the app prematurely, please advise.
Since social meta tags, schema validation, and SEO crawling cannot be tested properly on a protected development store, we are looking for the most compliant way to proceed.
Any guidance, best practices, or official workflow recommendations would be greatly appreciated.