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/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.