STARTUP · · 1 MIN READ

Shopify's Weird API Deprecation strategy

Shopify deprecates their APIs once every 6 months and it is a situation of anxiety for our development team. Because in case there is still a call site which is making calls to deprecated APIs, your shopify app can get delisted.

Shopify deprecates their APIs once every 6 months and it is a situation of anxiety for our development team.

Because in case there is still a call site which is making calls to deprecated APIs, your shopify app can get delisted.

Finding call sites for deprecated APIs can sometimes become challenging specially in large code bases involving multiple services.

Shopify API deprecation warning

In case a developer made a postman call to a deprecated API I guess that would still count as an invalid call and can lead to delisting.

In Shopify's defence they do start to give a warning about deprecated APIs way before but taking a strong action like delisting the app feels weird.

Maybe just making the existing APIs return an error citing deprecation would have been better ?

Ashutosh Singh

Technical co-founder of Bik.ai, where we help ecommerce brands automate customer support and marketing. I write about running the startup, developer productivity, engineering, and AI. Based between New York and Bengaluru.