What Shopify app should you build in 2025?

In 2023, I wrote about the top opportunities for app developers on Shopify. Two years later I now work at Shopify after they acquired Checkout Blocks. So, what are the top opportunities for Shopify app developers in 2025?

Before I begin, I want to reiterate that the two best places to collect this information is our Shopify Editions landing pages which act as a changelog for the last 6 months of updates and our quarterly earnings report which reveal performance and investment in key areas of Shopify.

Shop Minis

Often overlooked as it sits outside the traditional shopping experience for Shopify, Shop Minis are due for a breakout year in 2025. The Shop app has seen very strong merchant and customer growth in 2024, yet few developers are taking advantage of this surface area. Shop Minis provide merchants with a meaningful opportunity to customize their brand on the Shop app and introduce advanced functionality such as videos, upsells, and more. While the Shop app is not strictly a marketplace, it does standardize the shopping experience in a way that affords Shop Minis greater importance than otherwise.

Customer accounts and B2B

While quickly becoming crowded with new apps, I think it’s still relatively early and ripe for innovation. Traditionally, Shopify’s customer account pages were an afterthought. With the new customer account pages, Shopify now has a consistent and streamlined experience, and usage will only continue to grow with Shop Pay login, making the customer experience more seamless. The biggest opportunities in customer accounts are advanced customer edits, reorder flows, and facilitating B2B workflows.

Custom content

Also known as metaobjects and metafields, developing an app for an existing problem space such as, say, FAQs, but leaning heavily into metaobjects can be a unique opportunity. It will better compete against established players through lower cost and better performance. Metaobjects are becoming increasingly powerful throughout Shopify, and building metaobject-native apps will set you apart from legacy solutions that store data externally and hit common issues including data privacy, performance, and scalability cost.

Honorable mention - Shopify Flow

Similarly to custom content, leveraging Shopify Flow as an integration partner can be a great differentiator from similar apps. Even today, few apps take advantage of how easy it is to package a Shopify Flow workflow or custom trigger/action to extend the native functionality.

While you don’t want to focus solely on the technology, leaning into new APIs and platform features helps create a natural segmentation between incumbents and newer solutions. If I were starting over in 2025, I would focus my app on one of the above areas to achieve profitability by the end of the year. I've done this on each of my previous Shopify apps to great success.