Looking for new maintainer

[gnikyt]

With great sadness, I am throwing in the towel for this package after all these years. Between my work, family life, and priorities - with also trying to keep up with Shopify's constant erratic changes.. I can not balance it all effectively anymore. I wish to transfer this package off to the community (Kyon147 has expressed interest in doing this), if they wish, to continue it. This repository will have the README updated linking to this post. Should someone(s) decide to take over the repository with a fork - contact me and I will include a link.

Originally, I started this package many years ago when Shopify was young. Back when you could just load an app inside an iframe or send it off as an external link.

At the time, I had a lot of Laravel development on my plate, it was a way for me to give back to the Laravel community and allow others to easily jump in and develop an app for Shopify.

But, it became an uphill battle from there... starting with browsers, who began introducing changes over the years surrounding cookies, which lead to a halt of many apps from working, which as a result created a lot of work for this package to implement supports for ITP. As much of a hurdle as that was, when it was completed, we were faced with increasingly more changes from Shopify; API changes, deprecations, implementing tokens, changes in script tags, etc.

Furthermore, Shopify was releasing in-house tools, apps, and themes to the community at record pace. Many of the tools and themes Shopify introduced were quickly (IMO) sunset and deprecated in favor for something else. Shopify now offers tools and themes which are no longer recommended but actively used by many, and is now such a mess to navigate, it is hard to make sense of what is current and what is old. Boilerplate themes: Slate, Dawn, 2.0... CLI tools: Ruby theme gem, themekit, then Shopify CLI v2 and v3. All replacing eachother, not very well communicated to the community either, in my opinion.

Shopify has also put more forefront on their set of tools. Like Polaris, React integrations, and so on. Your app must conform to a lot of new strict guidelines that were quickly put in place by Shopify and dumped onto the app community suddenly.

Shopify now recommends using Shopify CLI v3 to build apps, extensions, and themes, for example. It essentially all loads in boilerplate code, but not done in a way that is update-able.

For example: the Node app feature will load in a Node app template from Github (which in my opinion was developed in a messy way), since its not a package to update as well, you have to follow the hidden Node template on Github to watch the commits for any potential updates you may need to apply to your apps. The templates do appear to work and meet all their requirements however.

But at this point, I am tired of keeping up with Shopify. The culture appears to be Google-like in the sense that promotion of new ideas and tools is forefront, anything existing is put on the backburner and not communicated well.

Its too much work for myself (and the contributors) to keep up with these constant changes. Shopify has paid full time staff members to keep up with the internal changes at Shopify - we don't. I wish their team would've joined this package and helped get over the hurdles, but that did not happen as I would have liked.

I love Shopify however, don't get me wrong. I will continue to use it personally and with work - I believe they are simply a victim of their own success in they grew so quickly, they tried to respond quickly with their infrastructure, which lead to the reason for so many changes and requirements for themes and apps. Their biggest fault is not communicating effectively with their developers, not providing a real long term roadmap. Hopefully it will begin to stabilize for developers. I am just personally left sour from the journey that got me here.

This package is currently left in a state where it needs to be rid of all the previous work for allowing developers to be creative.. it needs to be slimmed down, remove a lot of features, and conform to the actual wants of Shopify: tokens, React, Polaris, etc. Anything else is, or will be, an uphill battle I suspect.

As well, my company has grown... recently as of this month, myself and partners have started a joint venture with one of the largest and oldest retailers in Canada, to combine on a new adventure. I also have a very demanding family life with its own challenges. I do not have the personal time anymore like I used to.

It saddens me to throw in the towel for this package, a lot of time and effort has gone into it to help developers create apps. The package will remain on my Github, free for anyone to fork as mentioned, the README will be updated to link to this post. Should someone(s) decide to take over the repository with a fork - contact me and I will include a link.

Thank you everyone for your support over the years! It truly has been amazing to see something I start with no expectations, grow into something used by many.

I will be doing some post-cleanup over the next couple days such as shutting down services tied to this repository, services used by this repository, third parties, and renaming my UN, as well as updating the README. If Kyon147 is still interested in taking over the repository in a fork, you will see an update to the README for this as well if that is the case.

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Tyler