"i only speak liquid" #46: Shopify's Deprecated Apps

Hey everyone!

Welcome back to i_only_speak_liquid - I’m Jocelyn, a Storetasker expert and front-end Shopify developer. This is my 2nd edition of 4 newsies, let’s gooo!

What I’ve been thinking about:

Over the past month Shopify has announced the depreciation of a couple of core apps and features. The two notable ones are the Product Reviews app and the Geolocation app, which will be deprecated on May 6th and December 1st, respectively. 

Shopify has notoriously launched apps and then not allocated any dev resources to updating them. Some examples are the Planet app, Digital Downloads app and Fraud Filter app. 

Both aforementioned apps have been removed from the app store, but from my memory they also didn’t have many updates after the initial release. However, from my experience both apps worked well, albeit sometimes a bit finicky. 

What does this signal about Shopify?

I understand why they are deprecating the Geolocation app. Over the years Shopify has made advancements in their localization redirection technologies that make the Geolocation app redundant. These include expansion in their automation redirection feature, automation browser language redirection and consolidation of the GeoIP feature. Now Shopify Markets should be enough for most merchants to manage redirections to various markets.

On the other hand, deprecating the Product Reviews app seems like a forced cash grab. It is compatible with Online Store 2.0 themes and the functionality is generally fine. I know Shopify tries to give as much opportunity to app developers as possible, but in this case I believe product reviews are a core feature to any ecommerce platform. Shopify’s model so far has been to offer the most basic features as free and let the 3rd party apps take care of any fancy features. They’ve done this for Subscriptions, Translations, Search & Filter and more. 

Shopify seems to be wanting to go up-market so maybe this is part of their strategy. All I hope is that by letting these apps go, they will be able to gather more dev resources for bigger and better features that will positively impact everyone.

3 links you can’t miss:

1. IBM Equal Access Accessibility Checker: A google extension that is recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s Web Accessibility Initiative, the official body on web accessibility.

2. Devin, the first AI software engineer: The software world has been going crazy over Cognition Labs new release, which claims to be “the world’s first fully autonomous AI software engineer”. What are your thoughts on it? 

3. Baymard Institute: A great resource for keeping up to date with the latest UX trends in ecommerce with comprehensive UX research. 

1 app I like:

Wholesale Pricing Discount B2B

This app is great for B2B clients that have varying prices for different customer tiers. I’ve used this for all of my B2B clients and it's been extremely straightforward. The team takes care of setting up the required coding snippets within your theme. One feature I love is that you can have custom prices per variant which is super helpful for honing in on your specific pricing. 

One learning as a freelancer:

Hone in on your freelancing skill sets rather than branch out to many other skills. A  lot of freelancers at the start of their journey think it’s better to offer as many skills as possible because broader skills === more clients, right? Actually, more often than not it’s the opposite. Clients are confused about what you do. When clients look to hire they are looking for the best person that can solve their specific problem. If you’re just one person you will not convince clients that you are an expert in branding marketing, coding and PR. It’s better to hone in on one skills, such as coding and be THE coding person. 

The funny thing is, the longer I’ve been freelancing, the more I’ve found that I can learn within my skill. Clients will come to you because you can code good websites. But within a high quality website there’s accessibility, site speed, SEO, general code quality, and more. It can be even more powerful to be THE site speed person or THE accessibility person. 

When I first started freelancing I did everything under the sun in order to explore my possibilities. I built MVPs for startups, contracted for software agencies, built one-page personal sites, worked on WooCommerce and Shopify sites, and even got a lucrative contract working for a government contractor (that’s a story for another day). 

I found my passion in ecommerce and decided to go for Shopify. Of course it was scary to technically be offering less. But as mentioned before, as you dive deeper into a topic you find there’s so much more to enhance. It’s easier to market yourself, easier to have your mind in one place and ultimately, I’m as busy as ever. So it worked out in the end 😀 

I hope you enjoyed this edition. If you have any feedback, or better ways to do the things I touched on, let me know your thoughts!

See you next time,

Jocelyn