shopify-app-react-router: Support non-embedded apps

[bakikucukcakiroglu]

Hello Shopify Team,

Almost a year ago, I opened an issue requesting support for React Router v7. When I revisited the thread today, I saw the following note:

Non-embedded support
If you don't know what this means, your app is probably embedded. You can skip this section if your app is embedded.

Around 2% of Remix apps render in a separate tab or window (Non-embedded). This merchant UX is not as good so we are dropping support for this in the RR package. If your app is not embedded you can migrate to embedded, or stay on the Remix package.

Around 98% of Remix apps are unaffected by this change.

Our team is in that ~2%. We are building a Shopify-only app that is intentionally non-embedded, and we rely on ongoing support for this setup. We made this architectural choice early and invested heavily in it based on Shopify’s ecosystem and tooling direction at the time. Our app, by its nature, is not an embeddable app.

From our perspective, support for Remix and related packages has been steadily shrinking after its deprecation, and this makes our technology stack increasingly difficult to maintain and evolve. That is why we need to migrate to React Router v7 soon.

Dropping support for non-embedded apps in a core package puts teams like ours in a difficult position. Migrating to embedded is not always a simple or feasible option, and “stay on the Remix package” effectively means falling behind over time.

We’d really appreciate a clear direction here, because this impacts our roadmap and long-term maintainability significantly.

[lizkenyon]

Hi there 👋

Thanks for reaching out.

Could you provide some more information on what is the reason or platform limitation on why your app is not embedded?

[bakikucukcakiroglu]

Hello Shopify Team,

A large percentage of Shopify apps provide very basic functionality—often just 3–4 pages. Our product is fundamentally different. Lookfor is a platform for customer communication on Shopify, and our UI footprint reflects that. Today, we include:

• Unified inbox
• Multi-agent system editor
• Traces & debugging
• Outbound campaigns
• A settings area with ~6 sections, each with multiple sub-pages

We’re building a frontier platform for customer relations on Shopify, not a single-purpose vertical app. In an embedded context, we’re constrained to a small frame and a fixed navigation pattern, which makes it difficult to deliver a first-class platform experience especially when our IA (sidebar structure, nested navigation, and dense workflows) needs to adapt to the logic of the product.

Embedded apps work well for focused tools that solve one specific need. They are much less suitable for platforms like ours, where users spend significant time across multiple interconnected areas (inbox → traces → agent configuration → campaigns → analytics/settings). If you look at the screenshots below, our feature surface is closer to a full agent platform (e.g., comparable in breadth to ElevenLabs Agents UI) than a typical Shopify utility app.

Most non-embedded apps are non-embedded because they are multi-platform. We are Shopify-exclusive and want to remain Shopify-exclusive. However, we can’t rely on a deprecated path (or a shrinking support surface) given how quickly the web ecosystem evolves. It may be “fine” today, but in a year, staying on an increasingly unsupported Remix/non-embedded path will likely create real maintenance and security risk.

If there’s no viable solution for non-embedded Shopify-exclusive apps, we may be forced into the common workaround: using an embedded app primarily for authentication and routing, while hosting the actual platform UI outside the embedded frame. That’s not the experience we want for merchants, and it’s not the direction we chose when we built Shopify-only from day one.

Thanks for your consideration.

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