TLDR: We’re excited to see the new Polaris unified components and the Shopify Storefront MCP from Shopify's Summer '25.

‍

Shopify's Summer '25 Editions dropped with the usual fanfare of merchant-focused announcements, but buried in the product updates were two developer features that deserve more attention than they're getting. While everyone's talking about the flashy merchant tools, these updates are going to fundamentally change how we build on Shopify.

‍

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 huge.

‍

For years, developers have been stuck in a frustrating loop: build beautiful, cohesive experiences in the Shopify admin using Polaris, then completely start from scratch when building customer-facing experiences. Want to maintain brand consistency between your admin interface and storefront? Good luck stitching together different component libraries and hoping they play nice.

That friction is officially over.

‍

What this actually means for developers

The new universal Polaris system means you can now use the same battle-tested components across:

• Shopify admin apps
• Checkout extensions
• Customer account pages
• Storefront 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 example of a company that strives to create a user experience that feels consistent across all platforms. This release signals that Shopify is pushing for a similar continuity across all user interactions, and I'm here for it.

‍

The technical reality

The implementation is surprisingly elegant. Shopify has essentially created a unified design system that adapts contextually. The components understand where they're being rendered and adjust their behavior accordingly — same core functionality, appropriate styling for each environment.

This makes the overall dev experience so much better because Shopify handles how the "LEGO blocks" (the Polaris components) look. 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.

For Gadget users, this means that Autocomponents are getting even more powerful: now you can write fully-functional tables and forms across all platforms with only a few lines of code.

So for example, if you create a form using autocomponents:

‍

No matter where you include it, Shopify will automatically display the correct component variant for every use case.

‍

Shopify Storefront MCP: The missing piece for modern commerce

One of the best parts of shopping in person is that helpful lady who guides you through buying the perfect present for your mom. We all love that lady. And the downside to ecommerce has been that there’s no nice lady — until now.

Shopify Storefront MCPs allows developers to create robo-helpful-ladies that you can add to any Shopify store.

‍

What MCP actually does

For those not familiar, MCP is essentially a standardized way for AI models to interact with external systems. Shopify's implementation creates a direct bridge between AI applications and storefront data, with proper authentication and permissions baked in.

This isn't just another API wrapper. It's a thoughtful integration that lets AI applications understand and interact with Shopify storefronts with complete context awareness. 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 this matters more than you think

The real power here isn't in the technology itself — it's in what it enables. We're already seeing AI-powered commerce experiences that felt impossible just months ago:

• Customer service bots that can actually access order history and inventory data
• 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. Instead of cobbling together custom integrations and hoping they stay in sync, you get a standardized interface that Shopify maintains and updates.

Over the next few months, I expect we’ll see a horde of Shopify developers that will spin up Shopify apps that take full advantage of the Storefront MCP — and I’m really excited to see how developers start using this 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. With this update, there’s so much more potential.

You can spin up your next Shopify app at gadget.new and hang with the top 1% of Shopify devs on our Discord.