Collision in app proxy urls with no way to detect

Retired Boards Appdev Store Design
1

Our app uses(and has always used) an app proxy in Shopify to deliver files for products with digital items.

Recently a new app competitor has started and they have setup their app to use the same proxy url as our app uses. Because of this if a shop tries both apps one of them will not work due to the proxy url being on a different url than we expect(proxy-url-1 instead of proxy-url). As we need to send links that direct to the proxy url we need to be sure our proxy is at the url set in our app settings. Shopify provides us know way to know if the app proxy url is different than what we set in our app settings so there is no way for us to detect that this is different.

What can we do about this. In my mind our app proxy url should have been reserved and our new competitor should not have been able to reserve the same url. This is a large problem as many shops like to try out apps and the conflicting urls will mean that one of them will be broken if they try both apps.

Shopify, please either help us to reserve the urls or give us a way to detect that this is happening on a different url to give us a way to provide a reliable service.

2

Hi @Andrew-Corknine ,

You can try a script_tag that subscribes to AJAX or some other way of listening for requests being made to the proxy path. Perhaps look at the response to see if is from your competitor. Just a thought but I have ran into this when installing production and development versions of our loyalty app on the same shop only one proxy is used.

Regards,

Sam

3

Thanks for the reply,

Unfortunately this doesn’t really help us. In order to function reliably we need to KNOW where our app proxy is located in the shops url scheme. This should either be static(from shopify) or be accessible on the Shop via an API call and we should receive a webhook when this is updated.

Additionally it is not ok that a competitor can setup an app proxy on the same url we have setup and been using for years as a way to essentially break our app without us having any method of preventing this. For what we pay in Shopify fees we should be offered some protection that they won’t allow this.