I’m facing an issue with the app review process. I was recently suspended for three weeks. For the next review, they shared a screencast of what happened during the token exchange. I tried it two hours after the incident, and everything worked fine. It was a brand-new developer store, and I was a new user. There was no network traffic shown in the screencast, so I have no idea what caused the issue. My logs don’t indicate any problems. This suspension has now lasted for five months! Is there an appeal process or support to speak to someone directly, rather than just submitting a wait and see approach? This is incredibly frustrating.
Hey @Patrick_Henry, suspensions typically happen after repeated review failures and there isn’t an appeal process right now.
The fact that it wasn’t working during the review but was fine before and after sounds like it could’ve been a temporary issue on your server’s end. If you haven’t already, I’d check your server logs for that specific timeframe to see if there were any availability blips or failed requests. That alone might clear things up.
From there, it’s worth building in more resiliency around authentication and token exchange:
- Make sure your server has solid logging and monitoring
- Add error handling around the token exchange flow so failures trigger retries or show a recovery action (like a “Retry” button) instead of a dead-end error screen
- Handle cases where your backend is temporarily unreachable gracefully
Also, if you’re using an AI coding assistant, the Shopify AI Toolkit has an app review skill that can catch common issues before you submit. It’s a good way to pressure-test your app against review criteria on your own terms.
And if you still have time on your suspension, and you’re thinking about going for Built for Shopify status down the road, now’s a great time to review those requirements too. A lot of the resiliency work you’d be doing here overlaps with what’s expected there, so you’d be knocking out two things at once.