Forge bulk upgrades are blocked by new scopes, creating adoption barriers for Rovo and AI capabilities

Forge Forge Platform and Tools
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1

Hi everyone :waving_hand: ,

We’ve recently encountered a situation that made me wonder how other Marketplace Partners are handling this.

A previous release of our Forge app introduced a new scope. As expected, customers must manually upgrade and re-authorize the app before they can move to that version, and Forge bulk upgrades are therefore no longer available for those installations.

Since then, we’ve delivered and released new capabilities aligned with Atlassian’s strategic direction around Rovo and AI. These features are already in production and do not necessarily require additional scopes themselves, but they cannot be broadly adopted because some customers are still on versions that predate the earlier scope change.

As a result, a scope addition introduced for one feature can indirectly block adoption of completely different features released later.

Additionally, future platform capabilities may themselves require new scopes and another customer re-authorization step. This creates upgrade friction that can accumulate over time, making it increasingly difficult for partners to roll out innovations across their entire installed base.

This feels particularly relevant as Atlassian encourages partners to adopt new platform capabilities such as Rovo and AI-powered experiences. In practice, customers who have not completed a previous re-authorization step may be unable to benefit from future innovations, even when those innovations don’t require new permissions.

I’m curious whether anyone else is facing the same challenge, and how Atlassian sees this evolving in the future.

Fabien

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Hey,

I guess most of the apps of most the vendors are fragmented in some way. I am coming from DC, I always hoped that this is no issue any more in the cloud, but I was pretty wrong.

I think part of that problem is that “cloud” sounds like “all is updated automatically” because it usually is (at least when I think about my daily life). And since there is no notification system we can send messages to, there is also no unified way to to handle this.

I think there are some vendors displaying “You must update” messages or for connect apps just make older versions stop working - but that is also not such a great experience.

But yeah, fragmented apps are a real issue. We recently shipped rovo actions, I added a new scope for it and not many people have updated. I just checked the dev console, and most apps are outdated sadly.

Don’t get me wrong, I get the problem. You don’t want to add new scopes without letting the admin know about it, because this is kinda shady.

I think Atlassian’s solution are Rolling releases (see https://developer.atlassian.com/platform/forge/rolling-releases/), but I have doubts about the impact on apps … mostly because of Spaghetti code adn checking permissions/scopes all the time.

Best regards,
Christopher