TLDR: Launch fully functional apps in minutes with Gadget app templates

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Today, we’re excited to announce major improvements to Gadget app templates! We’re releasing updates to all our app templates and adding new template options for you to fork, customize, and launch directly from the app creation flow.

The Shopify App Store has thousands of public apps that help with countless niche problems. Yet, so often, brands run into unique, hyper-specific requirements that just can’t be solved without a custom solution. For most, developing a fully custom app from scratch is prohibitively time-consuming and costly. Brands are left to choose between imperfect solutions available off-the-shelf or exorbitant costs of building the right solution themselves. 

That’s where Gadget app templates come in. With templates, stores of any size have the opportunity to build tailored solutions to the common issues they often encounter — without breaking the bank. You start with the basic feature set that comes fully coded and operational and, instead, focus your time on building the unique feature requirements on top of an already complete app.

We built app templates to give developers fully functional apps, and many of you have taken those templates to quickly deliver highly custom, cost-effective solutions for clients, release your own apps, or handle under-the-hood functionality like billing. Gadget app templates are already powering more than 5,000 custom and public apps, and with the new and improved versions of templates, building and customizing your apps is easier than ever.

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A quick refresher: what are Gadget app templates?

Gadget’s forkable app templates give you a very basic version of your project built with Gadget and Shopify best practices (for free!). Each forked template instantly sets up full-stack infrastructure, along with all of the models, actions, frontend and backend code needed to power your app.

Templates are designed for customization. You can remove any of our included logic, extend it with custom code, or alter it. That means that app developers and agencies can deliver client projects in a fraction of the time by focusing the project scope on the alterations, not the foundations.

David Visser, COO at Zyber, shares that his agency has saved clients more than $10,000 by building with Gadget app templates. “App templates have allowed us to build out full-scale solutions and provide personalized apps to clients that otherwise would be too hesitant to run experiments. They’ve been an absolute game changer for how we work with clients.”

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What’s new with templates 2.0?

The new and improved app templates feature better setup, clear documentation, and more in-depth explanations of how they were built. Of course, they’re all compatible with the latest Gadget framework version, allowing you to quickly customize and build with new features like autocomponents.

We have also overhauled the public templates repository on GitHub, so you can always reference the original template code and configuration and submit any updates or changes you would like to see as pull requests.

What hasn’t changed is that you still have full access to all of the code powering each app template. Once you’ve forked a template, it’s yours to change as you see fit, adding or removing whatever you like.

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New templates to fork & extend

With the new improvements to our existing app templates, we’re also excited to introduce even more for you to customize.

Custom bundles

Get an embedded Shopify admin app that lets users create and manage custom bundles, with support for the basic Shopify bundle functionality. This template works on all stores as it uses the cart transform function and has been set up to respect item quantities.

Forking the new custom bundles template gives you: 

• A frontend to display and edit bundles, add new bundles, and see specific products within a bundle
• A backend with all the logic set up for creating and managing bundles
• A function that allows bundles to be handled in the storefront using metafields

You could extend the custom bundles template by adding inventory management policies, including the option to add bundle variants or allow users to customize the image used to display bundles on the storefront.

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Customer wishlists

Keep customers up to date on their favorite products with custom wishlists. This template gives customers the ability to create multiple wishlists, then sends out notifications on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis to update customers on the status (in stock, sold out, back in stock) for each item in their wishlist.

Forking the customer wishlists template gives you:

• A frontend UI that allows the store owner and staff to manage the frequency of notifications
• A backend that handles sending wishlist updates by email with the latest product status, and automatically respects customer subscription preferences
• A customer account UI extension and storefront extension for customers to add products and manage their wishlists

To extend the customer wishlists template, you may want to customize the frequency of the email notifications, change the branding and layout of the emails, or add discount codes for items that have been added to wishlists to help incentivize users. You could also set up more notifications to include events like sales and low stock and set them to trigger at the time a product status changes instead of on a time-based schedule.

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Shopify non-embedded React app

Many app developers want to build Shopify apps that can be accessed outside of Shopify using Gadget auth. This template gives you a non-embedded app that still handles the Shopify OAuth that merchants can use to view data related to their shop without needing to manage Shopify session tokens. 

Forking this template gives you:

• A Postgres database, Node.js backend, React frontend, and CRUD API
• The ability to handle authentication, access control, and permissions
• Gelly files to manage Shopify user tenancy for your standalone app

The standalone Shopify app template is primarily a starting point rather than an app with basic functionality, and is a variation of a default Shopify app built in Gadget. It could be used as a tool to enrich Shopify data by connecting with other systems.

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Whether you're building custom apps for clients or releasing your own public app, Gadget app templates give you a head start and let you focus on the unique features and functionality. You can browse our full collection of templates and share any questions, feedback, and suggestions in our community Discord.