What Happens to Your Mobile App During a Platform Migration (and What To Do About It)

Replatforming is one of the biggest technical projects you'll ever run. A Magento to Shopify Plus migration takes 12 to 24 weeks for a mid-sized brand, longer for complex catalogs. It’s the kind of thing that occupies all your engineering team’s attention, and requires intense planning and management to ensure your customers aren’t negatively impacted by the move.

There’s one major issue we keep hearing about brands running into when they’re migrating their ecommerce platform: their app.

The brand has a mobile app, which is tied to their original web platform. Migrating often means the app breaks; or requires a significant rebuild for the new platform, which adds to what is already an engineering and logistical slog.

It’s never your primary concern. But it’s a significant one, all the more concerning if you have users on your app already, who you don’t want to disrupt.

Keep reading and we’ll share the same advice we share with people from replatform brands that we’ve been talking to lately, on how to handle this tricky situation.

The Problem: Why a Platform Migration Breaks Your App

Whichever platforms you're migrating to/from, and however your app is built, a replatform typically means your app will break.

Your web platform and app are (or should be) tied together. They share from the same commerce backend. Inventory, orders, product details, accounts, all of this is connected, typically via platform APIs.

Changing platforms means changing APIs. It means a new set of APIs, which may need to be built from scratch, or which may be built for you, but exposing limited functionality than you used to have access to.

Your web UI is changing, and without updating your app, you risk showing two surfaces that look like different stores.

The details can be a little different, depending on what your replatform looks like (which platform you’re moving from/to), and how your previous app was built.

Let’s take a look at a few scenarios now.

No-Code Mobile App Built on a Platform-Native Builder

A no-code mobile app builder is a SaaS product purpose-built around one ecommerce platform's APIs. You configure the app inside a vendor dashboard. The vendor's product talks to your storefront. The data flow (catalog, cart, customer, checkout) runs through platform-specific connectors that only the vendor maintains.

When you change platforms, the connectors stop working. The vendor's product surface ends at the platform's API surface, so there's no rebuild path with the same vendor on your new stack. Tapcart, the largest no-code app builder in the Shopify ecosystem, states the constraint directly on its own site: it "is only able to support businesses that run ecommerce operations on Shopify."

This isn’t a con about Tapcart. It’s just the nature of the platform.

It’s the same with the hundreds of other tools in the Shopify App Store, as well as app builders tied to other platforms (e.g. you’re on Magento, built an app with a Magento app builder, and now picking up and moving to Shopify).

You’re looking at replacing your original app from scratch. Whole new vendor, whole new app.

Custom-Built Mobile App

Let’s say you’ve built custom. Fully custom, from the ground up. Maybe through an agency, maybe in-house.

You’re still, more than likely, using platform APIs to connect your app with your website.

In principle, you can rework the app to use the new platform’s APIs, and migrate your app along with your site.

But while it “can” be done, it adds a huge amount of complexity to your migration - which is already a drain on your resources, and a lot of things to juggle. Realistically, you’re rebuilding your app for the new platform.

If there’s a timeline you need to hit, get ready to extend it. If you need to keep within a budget, forget about it.

We’ve come across this many times. Rarely does the business have the engineering capacity to build a new mobile app, alongside their web migration. 

If you’re working with an agency, this means you and the agency need to be tightly aligned, or else there’ll be lag time between the website relaunch and the app relaunch. That may mean paying a premium to the agency to make your project their main priority.

All up, it’s just not something you want to add to the scope of shifting your entire commerce operation from one platform to another.

Replatforming Directions (and What Your Options Are)

The mobile app problem (and the solution) will look a little different depending on the direction of your migration.

Here are three common situations we run into, and what they mean for your app.

Off Shopify

You're moving off Shopify, to BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, headless, custom, anywhere. You've probably got an app built with one of the app builders in the Shopify App Store (e.g. Tapcart).

Once you migrate, your app stops working. Simple as that. Almost every Shopify app vendor only works with Shopify. So you're now faced with a custom build for the new platform, unless there's a no-code tool that happens to support your new stack.

Off Shopify, the no-code mobile app ecosystem thins out fast. On BigCommerce there are a handful of options, none with the depth of the Shopify equivalents. On Adobe Commerce and SFCC, there's effectively nothing at the no-code tier worth recommending. 

A custom build is the default once you leave Shopify, and that means building a whole new app alongside the web replatform.

Regular Shopify to Headless

This one's a niche edge case that a lot of brands don't consider until it bites them. You're staying on Shopify, but you're moving your frontend to Hydrogen or a custom headless build.

Technically, your app could still keep working. The Shopify backend is still there, and a Shopify-native app builder is still talking to the same Storefront and Admin APIs.

The problem isn't that the app stops working. It's that the app stops keeping up. The whole reason you went headless is that you wanted to build custom frontend experiences the standard Shopify storefront couldn't support. 

Once you start shipping those experiences on the web, they don't carry over to a templated, no-code app. The gap between your website and your app grows every month you keep building on the headless side - and eventually you might decide you need to rebuild the app anyway.

Non-Shopify to Shopify

This is the most common direction in enterprise replatforms right now. Magento to Shopify Plus. SFCC to Shopify Plus. Adobe Commerce to Shopify. Homegrown stacks to Shopify Plus.

The good news: there are more app options on the Shopify side than on any other platform. Pick a Shopify-native app builder and configure something for a standard Shopify store in a few weeks.

The catch: this is still a rebuild of your app. Your previous vendor isn't coming with you, and even if you were on a custom build, the codebase needs to be reworked or replaced.

There's a second catch if you're moving to Shopify Plus with headless or a complex custom build. The edge case from the section above kicks in early. The standard Shopify-native app builders won't be able to match what you're doing on the web, and you'll outgrow them faster than you'd like. That's the same gap, just hit sooner.

So even on the most app-friendly platform in ecommerce, this is still a from-scratch app launch. The decision is which kind of app you launch.

Why MobiLoud Is the Best Solution for Replatforming Your App

At MobiLoud, we’re becoming specialists in this. That’s because our approach is naturally the best fit for a brand that’s replatforming, and having to rebuild or replatform an app at the same time.

Here’s why MobiLoud is the best way to handle your mobile app during a replatform.

It’s Platform and Tech-Agnostic

MobiLoud works with whatever your new platform looks like, whether you're moving to Shopify or away from it. We support Shopify, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, Magento, Adobe Commerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, WooCommerce, and headless or fully custom commerce stacks. 

The app is built on the same tech stack as your website - not a separate build connected by APIs.

This is important. It means that when you migrate your website to a new platform (even to a fully custom, or headless stack), your app comes with it. We can build the app on your existing site, and have it switch to the new site once you launch, or build it on the new site that’s under development. Whichever works best for you.

(Building with MobiLoud also means, if you happen to migrate again in the future, your app will come with you. No dealing with the same headaches again.)

The Timelines Line Up

One of the biggest issues with rebuilding your app as a custom build is the timeline.

A web migration might take three to six months. A custom app usually takes six months to a year.

Do the math - even if both kick off at the same time, and you’re able to build the mobile app independently, you’re looking at one of two scenarios:

• Pushing back the web migration until the app is ready
• A time between the new website launching and the app being ready, where customers can’t use your app anymore.

Neither are good outcomes. The app being unusable for any length of time is a disaster scenario, especially if you’d already built a decent sized user base.

MobiLoud takes six to eight weeks to launch; potentially quicker. The time lines up perfectly with your migration, so you can launch with zero downtime for your app users.

MobiLoud is Battle-Tested with Platform Migrations

We’ve done this numerous times. We’ve seen many brands going through migrations, we know the issues that come up, the edge cases that have to be dealt with.

And since we specialize in this kind of work (not exclusively - but it’s one of the things we’re best at), you know you’re getting a partner that’s working towards the same goals you are.

We did this same thing with buybuyBaby, for instance; helping them launch a new app during their replatform, resulting in no downtime for their app users.

“The incredible part was that we didn't even have to think about the app during these transitions. When we finally reached out to check if our latest major redesign would affect the app, the response was immediate: ''You have nothing to worry about, everything will be fine.””
-Steven Kachtan, CIO of Dream On Me

It Works With All Your New Features

You’re replatforming for a reason. You want to build something new - you want to expand your web experience, launch new features your old platform wasn’t capable of, ship a better, more modern UI.

Whatever it is, MobiLoud lets you reflect the same design, the same features in your mobile app. It’s not going to limit you to a basic template, or double the work to ship all these additions in a new channel.

It’s fully synced with your new site, already. Whatever you’re building on the new site, you’re also building in the app.

Final Thoughts

Replatforming is already one of the most demanding technical projects you can run. Adding a mobile app rebuild on top of it just makes it messier. 

It stretches engineering resources, breaks your timeline and budget, and risks real disruption for your app users.

MobiLoud is the ideal way to replatform your mobile app at the same time. It takes the app project off your plate during the migration. The same app keeps running through the cutover, and your team only needs to focus on the web side of things.

If you're planning a migration and wondering what to do with your app, that's the conversation we're built for. Book a strategy call and we'll walk through your specific situation, and how we can help.