Significant Delays in App Block Development Due to Caching Issues

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

Persistent caching delays are slowing App Block development in a Shopify development store. After uploading App Block file changes, the hosted versions take up to ~10 minutes to reflect updates, blocking quick iteration and real-time verification.

Impact and context:

  • The delay appears to be a Shopify hosting/CDN cache behavior affecting App Blocks (app-provided theme sections).
  • A previously marked “resolved” forum thread on CDN caching is cited, but the issue persists.

Workarounds tried:

  • Renaming files after each change can sometimes bypass the cache, but it’s inefficient and unreliable.

Requests to Shopify:

  • Immediate steps to reduce/bypass the delay.
  • Investigation into why the issue persists despite prior resolutions.
  • A timeline for a permanent fix.

Latest update from Shopify support:

  • The caching behavior is acknowledged as a bug and is on the team’s radar.
  • No definitive timeline (ETA) for a fix was provided; no official workaround was offered.

Status:

  • Unresolved and ongoing. Key open questions: any effective interim mitigation steps and an estimated timeline for a permanent fix.
Summarized with AI on January 13. AI used: gpt-5.
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Hi Shopify Support Team,

We are currently facing a bottleneck in our development process with Shopify App Blocks that is impacting our productivity. Our team is experiencing considerable delays in the reflection of code changes within the App Blocks of our development store. This is slowing our iteration speed and is as follows:

Issue Description:

Upon updating any files within an App Block, we upload and deploy these changes to be hosted by Shopify. However, there is a delay of what can be up to 10 minutes before these updates are visible on the hosted versions. This lag hinders our ability to verify the functionality of our code changes in real-time.

Current Workaround:

The only partial solution we’ve discovered is to rename the files within the App Block after each change, which is highly inefficient and only sporadically effective.

Previous Discussions:

This issue has been previously reported and marked as resolved in the forums. Unfortunately, we are still encountering the same problem (as are others), which indicates that the resolution was not effective (reference: Shopify CDN Cache Issue Thread).

We request the assistance of the Shopify technical team to:

  1. Provide any immediate steps we can take to bypass or reduce the caching delay.
  2. Investigate the persistent nature of this issue despite previous reports and attempted resolutions.
  3. Offer a timeline for a permanent fix that will allow for seamless development experiences.

Many thanks,

Alex

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Bumping this…

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Update: I spoke to Shopify’s support team about this issue and they gave me this update:

“I spoke with the team on this and they are aware that this is a bug and it is on their radar to fix. However there is no definite timeline for when a fix would be rolled out.”

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