Julian

Alright, here's my 2 cents about this. It's not going to be short, but if you are a @ShopifyDevs, I'd love you to comment. I hate to moan about this, but I feel we need to do something to save what's obviously happening and before I know what, I'll just try and make myself heard. I'm going to share our app store experience in the past month or two. The preamble: We have a paid app that's BFS and has close to 40 reviews, has been around for almost 2 years, actively worked on in only 2026. Last month we launched 2 new free apps targeted at smaller merchants. We've been doing paid advertising for these over many channels, which drove many smaller stores to install them (close to 200 for both apps at this point). We've probably handled close to 40 support tickets at this point, 6-7 of which have confirmed over the support chat (some of them even sent an image) that they've left us a review. All of these stores are confirmed over GQL to not be Trial stores, but Basic ones. Only 1 of these reviews landed. We contact support to just find out what's happening. I get a "human" (that's what the button says), which throws all the AI affirmation bullshit responses like "You are completely right, but...", "I understand your frustation, but ...." 10-line messages, which generally say nothing. Among the many bs responses I got back was "reviews held by the trust system can become visible on their own over time as trust is established". I asked how we establish trust and I got told it can be many things - the review, the app, the merchant or whatnot. Go figure - we can't tell you why the review is being held, we can't tell you what to do to fix that issue. So, please, help me understand how to justify pouring money and effort into building something, feeling like we're actively being sabotaged by the platform we built for. Now, I understand all of that monitoring is probably there to battle people farming non legitimate reviews, but @malisauskasLT is reporting people farming app reviews breaking 90% of the rules for requesting reviews. Their apps get delisted for a week only to return with the same practices, but refined days, so it's harder to catch them. So, excuse my French, but what the *actual* fuck? Like, should we actually start paying for reviews and swallow the fact that we might get delisted for a week or so? @Shopify @harleyf I love the platform guys, sincerely. I've spent the past few years building for it and preaching it. Attended half a dozen Shopify events in Canada and Europe in the past few years. But I feel I need to call this nonsense out, because things have been going downhill for longer than they should be. Days before DotDev this year tens of thousands of legitimate reviews got erased (probably because of AI). That was not good. We were told that the app listing review process will be sped up (probably with AI). This resulted in completely bloating the app store even more. It's a far worse experience for both merchants and app devs right now. AI was implemented in partner support and it went from bad to worse. Previously, we were at least speaking with a human, although we were waiting a bit more. Now, we arguably speak with a human who copy-pastes LLM responses at best. It's not better than it was. AI has been implemented in monitoring app reviews and now no one can tell us what we can do to get our legitimate app reviews out that we have support working around the clock for. I love AI, but it's all about how we implement this. Somethings needs to be done to address this or the Shopify partner ecosystem we love will just become another victim of enshittification as it grows. Sincerely, me, who loves Shopify, but hates how things are going @ShopifyDevs