How to Distribute Custom App to Multiple Users?

[mkhfahad00]

Hi, from what I've understood through the docs is that i can use Custom-app distribution to provide my app to users without waiting for Shopify review (as it's in the publish process). Currently, we're creating multiple apps for each user (by changing the env variables and  `.toml` file) and then deploying them via Google Cloud Run as containerized apps; this is not scalable and very difficult to manage.

To create a custom-app distribution and share it with multiple users (for internal/beta testing) do I need to create multiple apps and then deploy them separately for each user or can I somehow utilize a single deployment for multiple users?

[lynth]

If I'm not wrong then you can share the same custom app URL with several stores if it is one organization. Otherwise, you have to create a few apps duplicates, dedicated to the specific store. 

[mkhfahad00]

Unfortunately, our initial users wont be in the same organization so we have to figure out a way of sharing custom apps with users easily, creating multiple apps is really difficult to manage.. it gets more difficult if you push an update and then have to manually redeploy for each individual user/app 

[lynth]

I'm afraid this is the only way, or to publish the app in the store.
https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/launch/distribution