POS UI Extensions and links

Extensions
1

It seems that POS Links are discontinued and deprecated as of February 28th. POS links (legacy)

Until now, I’ve been using a POS Link for my app. The user can click the application on the order page, and I show a page built with Polaris, React, and App Bridge, hosted on AWS, where the user can perform some operations.

Now, POS Links are disappearing, and I need to migrate to POS UI Extensions. I just need a way to open the link to my app. However, it seems the Navigation API doesn’t support external links.

Does this mean I have to rebuild my entire application for the POS? I still have to maintain the old version for the admin, but I’m not seeing a way to render it for the POS.

Can someone help me a bit here?

Thanks.

2

Hi @DavidGG,

I opened another topic about this same issue. I couldn’t recall the name of the deprecated feature exactly, thanks for sharing that.

POS Links enabled app developers to embed an external link for a merchant to open from a Tile.

These are being deprecated in February, with the intent to be replaced by POS Extensions.

However, POS Extensions don’t have a way to open external links. Therefore it breaks our app, since our apps rely on using the external camera on the device and other embedded A.I. models available to run on JavaScript in browser.

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3

Hey @Dylan , genuinely curious about your AI model, would it run in our JavaScript sandbox environment if you had access to the device camera in the UI Extension? If the camera component returned some sort of data or file, could feed that to your model in the sandbox? Are there networking calls involved?

4

So nothing here? I have the same issue migrating from POS links to POS UI extensions as @DavidGG

5

While POS Links are being deprecated, developers will still have 2 ways to extend POS: POS UI Extensions and embedding an app in POS

If a POS UI extension cannot meet your needs, then you can embed your app in POS, which will have the same functionality as POS Links

6

If I’m not mistaken, embedding an app in a POS allows the user to access it from the smart grid. However, the user can no longer access the app directly from an order with its context, as they could before, right?

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7

I believe @DavidGG is correct.

From what I can tell, embedding an app in the POS simply offers a website link option that will open the homepage of your application.

CleanShot 2025-03-05 at 09.45.03
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You don’t have any context of the customer, order, cart, etc.

You may be able to customize your app based on the headers of the request to detect if it’s a POS client.

Also, the merchant facing content to use your embedded POS app isn’t customizable at all (item #2 in the screenshot above).

Is it a workaround? Yes, in a way. Is it the same functionality? No, absolutely not.

But maybe I’m misunderstanding how to POS embed works, I would love to be corrected.

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