Yep, I’ve been banging on about this for years. Backporting is not a solution. Bulk-upgrade is not a solution. Atlassian signals a complete misunderstanding of the problem when these two are referenced.
The direct casual line of events that will play out for every app:
- Major version triggered for whatever reason (typically a deprecation).
- After 12 months you’ll have 70-90% of installs on the outdated version.
- The longer end-users remain stuck on old apps the less they will use them.
- Most admins do not manually update apps but they do routinely cull unused apps to cut costs - if you’ve ever had a support ticket asking about usage that’s what that is.
- Result: very low app usage, zombie apps and revenue losses marketplace-wide.
First happened to me with UI Kit 1 apps I built on Forge. The forced migration to UI Kit 2 also came with a forced permission scope change.
It’s inevitable that every marketplace app will have a major version event sometime in the future with the changing nature of Forge and the granular scopes.
Rolling Releases (EAP) is a partial solution but merely shifts the need for an admin to manually update an app to the admin needing to manually approve permissions.
Currently there is no admin notification system in place and partners report that in-app messaging doesn’t work. “We’ll improve this in the future” is not a viable answer from Atlassian if retroactive changes cannot be made to any Forge app that enters this state.
I’ve completely exhausted all contacts and channels to express this existential risk.