Hey Shopify devs,
Here’s a roundup of some of what shipped on the Dev Platform this month, including faster APIs, a cleaner Dev Dashboard, and some quality-of-life wins you’ll appreciate.
Role-based access control for the Dev Dash
We’ve rolled out a signifigant upgrade to how partner organizations work. You now have a proper organizational structure with a single Owner and Admins, role-based access control and centralized management through Organization Settings in the Dev Dashboard. No more one-size-fits-all permissions — you can assign roles that actually reflect how your team is structured.
Full details: Improved building for partners
Safer CLI deploys
The --force flag in shopify app deploy is being replaced with two more specific flags: --allow-updates and --allow-deletes. You now get granular control over what a deploy can do, so you can avoid accidentally deleting extensions when you just meant to push an update.
If you’re using --force today, start switching over as this will be deprecated in future versions.
Extension bundle size analysis
UI extensions have a 64 KB compressed size limit, and until now it was hard to tell what was eating up your budget. Starting with CLI version 3.92.0, running shopify app build generates an esbuild metafile (.metafile.json) in each extension’s dist/ folder. Upload it to the esbuild bundle analyzer or use any local tool that reads esbuild metafiles to see exactly what’s taking up space. See our docs for more details.
Refreshed Admin UI & App Home docs
The reference docs for Admin UI extensions and App Home got a major refresh. We rewrote all 387 reference pages with better descriptions, real code samples, use cases, and clearer pathways between related docs. The IA and terminology were also cleaned up to make it easier to build a mental model of how everything fits together.
Check them out and let us know if they’re hitting the mark.
Faster Admin API queries with breadth-first execution
We’ve been reworking how the Admin API executes GraphQL queries under the hood. Instead of resolving fields one object at a time (depth-first), we now process each field across all objects in a single pass. As this rolls out, you’ll notice faster API responses, especially for large list queries, and a snappier Admin experience overall.
If you want the deep technical dive, the engineering team wrote about it here: Faster Breadth-First GraphQL Execution
Catalog improvements in the Dev Dashboard
The Catalogs experience in the Dev Dashboard got some updates this month:
- Cleaner UI: tidied up the interface to make it easier to find what you need
- Query prefix support: you can now use a query prefix when searching catalogs, making it faster to filter down to what you’re looking for
This is part of the broader work to make the Dev Dashboard the single home for everything you build on Shopify.
App-space metaobjects no longer require write_metaobjects scope
Metaobjects in the app-owned namespace are your domain, so we removed the requirement to request the write_metaobjects scope to work with them.
If your app stores data in metaobjects, this means fewer scopes to request and a simpler migration path for apps moving data into metaobjects, including one less permission prompt for your merchants to approve.
Dev Dashboard: new navigation
If you’ve been in the Dev Dashboard recently, you might’ve noticed the navigation feels different. We got rid of the double left-nav and replaced it with a drill-in navigation, to make it simpler and easier to find your way around.
Admin intents now support Settings
Admin intents let your app navigate merchants to specific pages in the Shopify admin with a single API call. This month, we added support for Settings pages, so you can now send merchants directly to things like store details, location management, or order formatting settings.
Please drop questions or feedback in the thread - we’d love to hear your impressions!
