What are Shopify's App extensions and why you should use them

When you enable a visual app to your Shopify’s storefront, you may be wondering whether this app would break the layout of your store’s theme, or tangle the display of some product cards. It happened more often when you have manually edited your theme, or have applied some Shopify apps which need to modify your .liquid files.

The case is really annoying. Change one thing, some other breaks. Applied one app, some products were misplaced… … Since those theme files are just a bunch of files, nobody knows the relations between the elements buried in the codes and texts. This is the butterfly effect for co-editing the theme files.

How about putting the relationship between elements into cages? This is where we should talk about Shopify’s App extensions, a feature of some Shopify’s to aid you. With the latest generation of Shopify’s theme, you could open the designer of your theme. Now you may add, move, configure, and remove some components into your theme without editing the source files, especially if some components are from Shopify’s apps you installed. Yes, those apps are the ones got app extension feature supported.

Now you have seen those apps, what exactly are the differences they make? The reason behind this is Shopify’s latest generation of themes. Those themes abstract the elements of your store at the conceptual level, and map the conceptual elements to those components despite how the components is designed and coded. For third-party apps, the components also mean containers or cages, i.e., whatever an app does is bounded by the component wrap it and no liquid file is touched. The mechanism of app extension provides baseline security for the problems caused by either the modification and upgrade of your theme code or the installation and uninstall of third-party apps.

In the Shopify app store, how do we know if an app support app extension? Just have a look at the Highlights part, there will be a mention like below:

For example, you may have a look at our app https://apps.shopify.com/product-slider-carousel-floho-1 .

Of course, the app extension supported apps won’t fix everything, but surely it will save you a lot of time. So, maybe it is time to install and try!