Nowhere in the developer docs does it say “oh btw while we say this is a cloud platform, the DX is more akin to building server apps in 1999 because we haven’t solved versioning yet… so make sure you carefully tag every single release in git… and don’t even think about releasing a free Forge app if you ever plan to monetise it”.
Thing is I’ve been screaming about this problem for years. It’s a death spiral for all marketplace partners. I’m simply one of a few canaries because of how early I built Forge apps (UI Kit 1). The problem will compound until it destroys the businesses of marketplace partners.
I’ve had multiple Zoom calls with internal Atlassian’s to talk about this.
Basic solutions have been overlooked that could have been implemented years ago and are still missing to this day: eg notifications to admins within the core product.
Suggested future solutions I’ve heard like “versionless apps” will make the code complexity too high for the majority of partners. Unless that plan has radically changed since I last spoke to them it will involve developers having to switch on/off features depending on what permission scopes admins have approved. ie an infinitely complex nightmare to manage.
The entire point of modern cloud-based agile software development is you move fast, deploy multiple times per day, and sync all customers onto the latest version. It’s a operational and security nightmare to have 90-99% of your customers spread across all prior app versions.
And it’s worse than building server apps! With old-school server apps at least your customers could still have functioning apps despite not running the latest version. Whereas when Forge deprecates something like the runtime or UI Kit, that means customers running old versions literally have broken apps. Remember I had to beg you guys to add any fallback UI messaging the last time you deprecated the runtime!
The longer this goes unsolved while deprecations continue to happen, the faster this entire ecosystem will collapse.