Why is the Shopify theme update dropdown missing?

Shopify Discussion
1

Hi everyone,

Has anyone here experienced an issue where a customer installs a theme directly from the Shopify Theme Store, but the “Update theme” dropdown / changelog arrow does not appear in Online Store > Themes?

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The customer has:

  • purchased the theme properly,

  • installed it directly from the Shopify Theme Store,

  • and we have already ruled out any unlicensed/pirated theme issue.

I contacted Shopify Support and they confirmed the issue is on Shopify’s side. Their response was:

"When your theme was installed from the Theme Store, an internal identifier on the theme record didn’t get set to a value that matches any of the published versions in our system. That mismatch is what’s causing the ‘Update theme’ dropdown to stay hidden —

the system can’t recognise the installed version as one it has an update for."

Shopify said their DEVs are working on a backend fix, but currently they do not have any ETA or workaround.

As a temporary solution, I offered manual updates through Theme Access from our developer side, but this is obviously inconvenient because the customer wants to manage updates normally through Shopify’s built-in update system.

I’d like to ask:

  • Has anyone here encountered the same issue before?

  • Were you able to fix/relink the theme version somehow?

  • Did Shopify provide any manual workaround from the backend?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

2

Would be interesting to see what’s in this property, i guess NULL?

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I’d try to pull current theme files via CLI or alike, install a new copy from store, ensure it’s “linked” and push current theme files to a new copy.

3

Thank you so much for your answer. I already tried installing a completely fresh/latest version directly from the Shopify Theme. Store with no customizations at all, but unfortunately the issue still persists.

So far, this seems to happen only on this specific customer’s store.

5

Same happen to some of our stores
what we did, we clear entire browser cache and wait for some time and then tried it again and it works, if still issue happens you can directly connect with chat support, they will fix it from backend

6

So sad. I tried login and check by incognito browser. I contacted Shopify many times but don’t have any solution

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7

You may try reporting this in dev forums https://community.shopify.dev – actual Shopify employees are present there and may provide some insides.