The Summer ’25 Editions of Shopify were released with the usual fanfare of merchant-focused announcements. However, two developer features that require more attention than they are receiving were buried in the product updates. These updates will fundamentally alter how we build on Shopify, even as everyone is talking about the flashy merchant tools.
Polaris goes universal: Finally, consistent design across the Shopify ecosystem
The biggest news? Polaris components are now available across the entire Shopify ecosystem, not just admin apps. This is enormous. Developers have been stuck in a frustrating cycle for years: use Polaris to create beautiful, cohesive experiences in the Shopify admin, then start from scratch when creating experiences that interact with customers. Want to maintain brand consistency between your admin interface and storefront? It will be difficult to combine various component libraries and anticipate their compatibility. That conflict has officially ended.
What this actually means for developers
The new universal Polaris system means you can now use the same battle-tested components across:
Apps for Shopify admins Extensions for checkout Pages for customer accounts e-commerce experiences Partner dashboards
This isn’t just about saving time (though you’ll save plenty) — it’s about creating genuinely consistent experiences that feel native to Shopify, regardless of where your users encounter them.
Apple is a great illustration of a company that strives to provide a consistent user experience across all platforms. I’m all for Shopify’s push for consistency across all user interactions, and this release shows it.
The factual situation Surprisingly elegant is the way it is put into practice. Shopify has essentially created a unified design system that adapts contextually. The components know where they are being rendered, so they change how they behave there. Each environment gets the same core functionality and style. Because Shopify manages the appearance of the “LEGO blocks,” also known as the Polaris components, this greatly enhances the development experience as a whole. You just have to put the blocks together.
This solves one of the most annoying aspects of Shopify development: the cognitive overhead of switching between different component libraries and design patterns depending on what part of the platform you’re building for.
This means that Autocomponents are getting even more powerful for Gadget users: you can now write tables and forms that work on all platforms with just a few lines of code. For instance, if you use autocomponents to create a form: Shopify will automatically display the appropriate component variant for each use case, regardless of where you include it.
The missing component for modern commerce is Shopify Storefront MCP. The helpful salesperson who helps you select the ideal present for your mother is one of the best parts of shopping in person. Everyone adores that woman. Additionally, there has never been a nice lady in e-commerce until now. With Shopify Storefront MCPs, developers can create automated assistants that can be added to any Shopify store.
What MCP actually does
For those who aren’t familiar, MCP is basically a standard way for AI models to communicate with other systems. With integrated authentication and permissions, Shopify’s implementation establishes a direct connection between AI applications and storefront data. This is not just another wrapper for the API. AI applications can now interact with Shopify storefronts with complete context awareness thanks to this thoughtful integration. Rather than every Shopify store needing to train their own custom AI agent, they have that capability out of the box — and that means a world of opportunity just opened up for Shopify app developers.
Why it’s more important than you think The power lies not in the technology itself but rather in what it makes possible. Experiences in commerce powered by AI that seemed impossible just a few months ago are already being seen: Bots for customer service that actually have access to order history and inventory information Content generation tools that understand your product catalog and brand voice
Personalization engines that can make real-time adjustments based on storefront behavior
The Storefront MCP makes all of this significantly easier to build and maintain. You get a standard interface that Shopify updates and maintains, so you don’t have to put together your own custom integrations and hope they all work together. I anticipate that a large number of Shopify developers will create Shopify apps that take full advantage of the Storefront MCP over the next few months. I am extremely excited to see how developers begin utilizing this feature with Gadget. Even before the vibe coding era, we’ve seen so many users reduce their dev time by orders of magnitude — like Rewind going from nothing to live on the Shopify App Store in just 4 weeks, or Radikal eliminating 70% of the code they write. There’s so much more potential with this update.
