Betting Big on Mobile: Why We Acquired AppMaker

If you follow the Shopify ecosystem closely, you've probably noticed a shift in how merchants think about mobile. A few years ago, a native app was a luxury for D2C brands, nice to have, an engagement experiment. Today it's becoming table-stakes, especially for brands that care about retention.

We've been watching this shift for a while. Today, we're making a bet on it: we've acquired AppMaker, one of the most extensible mobile app platforms in the Shopify ecosystem. Rather than build a mobile platform from scratch and spend years competing with them, we acquired the team and technology that had already solved the problem.

The mobile problem that doesn't get solved

Most Shopify merchants who want a native app face two options.

Option 1: a templated app builder. 
Fast and inexpensive, but it doesn't feel like your brand. Your app looks like everyone else's, and your customers notice.

Option 2: a custom build with a dev team or agency. 
Beautiful and fully branded, but it typically runs into six figures and takes the better part of a year.

So most merchants punt on mobile. They lean on email, run ads, and decide mobile can wait. But for the brands winning right now, mobile has become the retention engine, the channel driving stronger repeat purchases and higher lifetime value.

What AppMaker built

AppMaker spent years solving the trade-off between speed and control. Their platform pairs a block-based no-code builder for quick launches with the extensibility that lets dev teams and agencies customize deeper when they need to.

Top D2C brands use it to ship fully branded mobile experiences, and AppMaker's data shows those apps drive higher conversion, stronger repeat purchase behavior, and better lifetime value.

Why this matters now

Something structural is changing in how D2C brands think about customer relationships. Mobile commerce is on track to reach roughly $2.4 trillion in 2026 (per Fortune Business Insights), and that growth is happening on customers' phones, not their desktops. 

At the same time, paid acquisition keeps getting more expensive, so brands are reallocating budgets away from ads and toward owned channels they control. Mobile apps are becoming the primary owned channel: the place a merchant builds a direct relationship with the customer.

The catch: enterprise-grade mobile infrastructure has stayed out of reach for most Shopify merchants, too expensive, too technical, or too templated. AppMaker had already closed that gap. Acquiring them was faster and better for merchants than rebuilding years of their expertise ourselves.

A strategic bet on distribution

StarApps brings deep distribution in the Shopify ecosystem: 30,000 merchants trust our apps, 2,500+ of them Shopify Plus, built over a decade of solving their problems every day. AppMaker brings a proven platform that D2C brands already choose to power their mobile strategy.

Put those together, and Shopify merchants who want a serious mobile strategy get proven platform infrastructure, backed by a company that understands their ecosystem. That's the bet.

Where this is headed

Merchants who've invested in mobile are outperforming those who haven't, and the gap is widening. Mobile is becoming one of the highest-return investments a D2C brand can make, and we're focused on making that infrastructure genuinely accessible to Shopify merchants.

For the official announcement and formal quotes, read the Press Release here. This post is the story behind it: why mobile matters now, why AppMaker, and why we made this bet. If you're a merchant considering mobile, you know where to find us.

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