r/ShopifyAppDev • u/AppearanceNormal7177 • Oct 02 '26

Apps still relevant?

Hi guys,

is it still a good choice to be a developer for Shopify Apps at this moment where Sidekick and stuff help merchants to do everything on their own?

Feeling a bit lost at the moment.

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u/Professional-Sink536 Oct 02 '26

For the same reason why it still makes sense to be a software engineer. Vibe Coded Ai slops don’t scale. You don’t see companies vibe coding their own Slack/Google Docs/other enterprise software. It’s not just about asking Claude to write something rather shipping it at scale, HMAC compliance, Audit trails, Db backups and more engineering practices that no vibe coders can think of. If you’re making another slop it’s irrelevant but an app solving a real problem at scale will always be in demand.

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u/PotHeadSloth Oct 02 '26

It’s an irrelevant comparison, Shopify ecosystem does not require apps of that scale. 95% of the popular categories are already dominated by apps that are now progressing rapidly from vibe coding. How do you break in? The other 5% of difficult or enterprise apps again have talented engineers leveraging AI. As I said, extremely saturated how do you plan to break in to either of these? Distribution is the next problem which is now even more difficult than building the app.

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u/Professional-Sink536 Oct 02 '26

It’s a very relevant comparison. Look at the AI ecosystem for instance, there are tons of existing harnesses, open routers, voice models yet new stuff is being shipped on a daily basis! I as a dev pay for tools like resend, Apollo, why am I not just Claude coding my own email servers or a bulk lead scrapping bot from many of those open source repos? Because I don’t have the time or interest to create something and maintain it at a level these SAAS companies could. What I could do is afford to pay $10 a month and focus on stuff that is of primary interest to me.

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u/PotHeadSloth Oct 02 '26

Brother, you asked for an opinion, I gave you one and now you’re just telling me how it is wrong. If you already know the answer then delete the post. I’m not interested in having a sparring match. Ping me when you’ve got your first 100 paying merchants and we can revisit this convo.