If you ask us, 2024 was a great year. From major Gadget platform upgrades to memorable community events, the last year was filled with moments of community, collaboration, and progress. We’ve seen our platform evolve in exciting ways and our community accomplish extraordinary things. Here's a look back at some highlights.

Key moments 

The year kicked off with the launch (and later expansion) of Gadget app templates. These templates were designed to simplify app development, helping developers get started faster and create robust solutions tailored to their needs. We've been thrilled to see how quickly our community has adopted and innovated with them.

Next came the arrival of the Gadget Partner Program and our new directory of Gadget experts. This initiative connects developers with talented professionals who specialize in building with Gadget. Whether users needed help with their app or were looking for expertise to level up their projects, this program made finding trusted collaborators easier than ever.

It wouldn’t be a 2024 recap without a look back at Pre/ditions. In June, we teamed up with our friends at Mantle to host a full-day conference ahead of Shopify’s Editions.dev: an event by the ecosystem, for the ecosystem. 

Bringing Shopify app developers and agencies together for a day of learning and networking was a blast. With 30 incredible speakers and panelists like David Visser from Zyber, Dietlev Maertens from Radikal, and Rigel St Pierre from Mejuri sharing their knowledge, it was a uniquely vibrant event. We loved meeting so many Gadget users in person and had the chance to get to know the people behind some of our favorite apps.

We rounded off our roster of big events with the Gadget Hackathon 2024, which attracted participation from over 250 developers. The submissions were astonishing, showcasing sheer creativity and skill, and we celebrated three standout winners who impressed us with their groundbreaking apps.

Major platform upgrades

2024 was a massive year for the evolution of Gadget. We hosted our first-ever Launch Week to introduce framework version 1.0, unveiling features that transformed productivity and collaboration on Gadget projects. The star of the show? Our new schema files — a huge leap forward from the action cards in earlier versions of the framework.

But that was just the start. Here’s a snapshot of what made framework version 1.0 such a game-changer:

• Git-based source control for seamless version management
• Unlimited full-stack development environments, so your dev and prod environments are always the same and teams can build freely without constraints
• Background actions, allowing you to run your complex tasks and operations in the background using a built-in queueing system
• Major CLI improvements to streamline your development workflows and build apps in your local environment

With the introduction of Autocomponents, we’ve seen a ton of frontends built faster than ever. Since developers can generate tables and forms with a single line of code, it’s a brand-new way to simplify and accelerate frontend development. We’re here for better efficiency without sacrificing customization or flexibility.

The new BigCommerce connection means Gadget is now even more available for developers building ecommerce apps. There’s now a whole new ecosystem to build Gadget apps in, so BigCommerce merchants and developers can expand the platform’s functionality with minimal effort.

The addition of TypeScript support was a major leap forward for developer productivity. Strong type-checking, improved debugging, and more predictable development workflows are just some of the benefits this feature brought to the table.

Gadget’s API client is available in Remix <inline-code>action<inline-code> and <inline-code>loader<inline-code> functions, so you can build full-stack Shopify apps using a familiar framework. This means faster, more efficient apps — all with the support of the platform developers already know and love.

Finally, we rolled out a series of quality of life fixes, all designed to make Gadget even more intuitive and developer-friendly. From minor but impactful updates to bigger usability improvements, every upgrade added to the experience of building with Gadget.

Community milestones

We also want to take a moment to appreciate the success some of our users saw throughout the year.

It’s always great to see hard work recognized, and there were several apps built on Gadget that managed to find themselves featured in the spotlight on the Shopify app store. SuprImg saw a 30% spike in traffic after they were featured, and the team at POSCafe focused on adding more features as new users poured in.

Caseo AI, one of the apps from the Gadget incubator program, reached a major milestone when they generated more than 300,000 product descriptions for Shopify merchants. 

Apps like Biscuit Bundles earned the coveted Built for Shopify badge, while Ribbon and Lantern were among Shopify’s top picks for customer account UI extensions, showcasing the diversity of talent found in the teams behind Shopify apps.

Finally, we capped the year off with a record-breaking Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM). This success reflected not just the growing power of Gadget but also the ingenuity and hard work of the entire community.

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So here’s to an unforgettable year — and to 2025, which promises even more exciting opportunities and milestones. Thank you for being part of this extraordinary journey! We’re excited to continue building the future together.