Shopify Mobile Checkout SDKs for iOS and Android

Checkout is hard and complicated. We made it easy with Checkout SDK for iOS!

Import the SDK, call presentCheckout with a cart URL, and voila: fully-featured mobile checkout experience that retains business rules, branding, functions, and UI extensions. You can also customize light/dark mode behavior, register delegate callbacks for lifecycle events, and instrument your app to emit preload hints to deliver an instant render. Android SDK coming soon to a GitHub repo near you. ??

Lessons learned ????...

Joining Shopify, I appreciated that delivering a great checkout experience is a complex problem, yet I still dramatically underestimated the true depth and complexity of this space...

From 10k feet, checkout is responsible for enforcing merchant business rules, resolving buyer preferences in a given input context (cart contents, locale, sign-in state, and type of the buyer, etc.), and orchestrating all of the downstream services that dictate the terms & flow of checkout.

Feature and build complexity are combinatorial

To a naive observer, checkout is about accepting payment with a few additional requirements: shipping, discounts, and gift codes. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Merchants also need support for: product bundles, which affect pricing, discounting, and shipping; delivery promises and control over presented shipping methods, including local/store pickup and custom pickup points; control over how orders and shipments are grouped and split; support for upsell flows and other UI customizations; loyalty programs; support on navigating archaic global tax system and fragmented regulatory bazaar (e.g., location of a checkbox makes a big difference for some locales); the list goes on and on, and on, and ...

The complexity is combinatorial. Almost every feature affects or interacts with many others, requiring a deep systems-thinking approach ?? to retain a cohesive and coherent architecture.

Presentation and UI are critical business logic

The second unintuitive insight is that checkout UI is inseparable from the backend API. Many will gladly sell you a checkout API (heck, we offer one too, and we learned a lot from watching merchants and partners struggle), but delivering a great checkout requires both backend and frontend logic to work together: many of the merchant business rules are encoded in the UI, dictating which and where terms, offers, and other content is displayed; UI needs to dynamically respond to buyer input and context, and orchestrate the necessary renegotiations flows, error states, etc. API-based checkouts don't get you to the destination. At best, you're stuck reimplementing logic across every platform. More likely, you're juggling a patchwork of inconsistent capabilities and a hefty recurring dev+maintenance bill.

The magic behind the new Checkout SDKs for iOS and Android is the fully managed runtime that wraps web checkout, extends its capabilities to adapt to mobile app context, and provides a simple and easy-to-use API to embed and customize its behavior. The resulting experience is consistent across all platforms, always in sync, and easy to maintain. ??

The path forward...

Embedded architecture is not new, but it is neither simple nor easy. To do it right, you need a well-defined protocol and API between the embedder and embedded content, platform-specific adaptations in logic and presentation, and a sharp focus on performance. That's what mobile SDKs are solving.

Check out Mani Fazeli 's blog post for more details on how and why we built the Mobile Checkout SDKs. Also, and most importantly, take 'em out for a spin, and share your feedback, questions, and suggestions! ??