Hi Shopify team,
I’m an independent Shopify app developer, and I’m writing here because the recent review enforcement has had a very serious impact on our app. I’m hoping the Shopify Governance/App Store team can review our case with more context.
First, I want to be clear: I fully support Shopify’s goal of strengthening trust in App Store reviews. Fake reviews and manipulated reviews are bad for merchants, bad for honest developers, and bad for the App Store.
But what happened in our case feels extremely heavy-handed, and from our side, not fully representative of the real merchant usage behind the app.
We launched in a very competitive category with 80+ similar apps. To compete, we made the app completely free and worked extremely hard to support merchants quickly. In a short time, Lots of merchants installed the app, and around many merchants actively enabled it in their theme editor. These were not fake stores or fake installs. These were real merchants using the product for a real compliance need.
We did previously have a review request flow that Shopify later flagged as non-compliant. After receiving the warning, we immediately changed the flow and removed any incentive-based language. Since then, the app has used neutral review messaging, and no merchant receives any feature, benefit, plan, or access in exchange for leaving a review.
A few days ago, however, almost all of our 5-star reviews were removed at once. Around 185 reviews disappeared, our ranking dropped heavily, and we are now losing visibility, installs, and users every hour. For a small independent developer, this is not a small adjustment. It can destroy months of work overnight.
I have already contacted Shopify Partner Support about this, and the case was escalated under Ticket #68797568. I have also tried to reach the Governance team through the available support channels, but it has now been over a day with no clear reply or update. I completely understand that teams need time to investigate, but the impact is immediate and ongoing. Every day without visibility or clarity is causing serious damage to our app’s ranking and growth.
My concern is not that Shopify is enforcing review trust. My concern is that there does not seem to be a clear distinction between:
- Fake reviews
- Reviews from real merchants who never used the app
- Reviews connected to a previously non-compliant request flow
- Genuine reviews from real merchants who installed, enabled, and actively used the app
If every review collected during a certain period is removed automatically, even when the merchant genuinely used the app and gave honest feedback, that feels like a very broad punishment rather than a careful review trust process.
What I’m asking for is not special treatment. I’m asking for a fair manual review process:
- Please review whether the current app implementation is now fully compliant.
- Please confirm if any further changes are required.
- Please manually review whether all removed reviews were actually connected to the flagged flow.
- Please separate genuinely fake or non-compliant reviews from real merchant reviews where possible.
- Please provide developers with more transparency when a large number of reviews are removed.
- Please consider the proportional impact this has on small developers who built real products used by real merchants.
Again, I understand and respect the purpose of the policy. But when an app with real usage, real merchants, and active installations loses almost its entire review history overnight, there needs to be a clearer appeal path and a more careful manual review process.
This is a serious issue for small Shopify app developers. Reviews are not just vanity metrics. They decide ranking, trust, installs, and whether an independent app can survive.
I would really appreciate someone from Shopify Governance or the App Store team looking into Ticket #68797568, It’s been more than a day, and I am not hearing anything from the governance team.
Thank you.
Subham
Independent Shopify app developer