New API version, deprecation of the old versions
On April 1st, 2021, Shopify launches the 2021-04 version of API and at the same time, the old 2020-04 version will become deprecated. If you make requests with no specified API version, you will be served with the 2020-07 version, which will be the default one.
All private apps will no longer have access to unsupported versions of the API: 2019-04, 2019-07, 2019-10, 2020-01, and 2020-04.
You can check full release notes of the 2021-04 version here: https://shopify.dev/concepts/about-apis/versioning/release-notes/2021-04
Top Trends of 2020 in Shopify App Store
Shopify did an analysis of all Shopify App Store applications for the past 12 months and marked the most important areas, which were popular during the past year.
Internationalization and localization
As you have heard, multi-language support currently comes out of the box with Shopify. Now we have multi-language and multi-currency support at the same time, by almost similar approach under the hood.
It means we can say goodbye to an old Langify app or Weglot, and move to easy-to-use and no code modifying apps:
- Translate My Store by Hextom
- Translation Lab ‑ AI Translate by Sherpas Design
They are free, they use SEO-friendly native translation of Shopify and this is awesome. You will get locale-aware URLs as well. No cheating, code manipulations, crazy sub-domain witchcraft.
Here you can check the Translate My Store app: https://hextom-tms-demo.myshopify.com/.
How to enable multi-language support
To enable multi-language support you need to go to the Settings->Store languages and install one of the translational apps, for example, one of the 2 apps above.
All free Shopify themes already have multi-language support. As you can see from the code, now we have a new type of form tag, called ‘localization’:
By the way, I can’t see any mention of this tag in the official docs: https://shopify.dev/docs/themes/liquid/reference/tags/theme-tags/#form.
Product sourcing apps
Shopify claims that the momentum for product sourcing apps is showing no sign of slowing down either.
Check the product sourcing app leaders:
- DSers‑AliExpress Dropshipping by DSers
- CJDropshipping by CJDropshipping
Social media integrations
On the 29th of June, 2020, Instagram stopped the old API and it became impossible to display photos from personal Instagram accounts to widgets. It demanded a new process based on user access tokens to display Instagram feeds and some of the Shopify Store apps did that pretty quickly.
Here are top instafeed apps:
- Instafeed by by Mintt Studio
- Instagram Feed + Photo Gallery by Space Squirrel Ltd.
