Your Shopify Integrations Break on 16 October Unless You Act
Shopify retires API version 2025-10 on 16 October 2026 at 15:00 UTC. After that moment, any request sent to that version stops working. Not degraded, not warned about again. It stops.
Most merchants reading this will be fine, because their apps are maintained by somebody who tracks this. The ones who will not be fine are the merchants with a custom app somebody built in 2025 and nobody has touched since. That integration has a version number hardcoded in it, and nobody is watching the calendar on your behalf.
What exactly retires on 16 October?
Shopify publishes a versioning policy on shopify.dev. Each stable version is supported for a minimum of 12 months, with at least nine months of overlap between consecutive versions. Version 2025-10 was released on 1 October 2025, which puts its retirement almost exactly a year later.
The documentation is specific about the cutoff. Version 2025-10 is accessible until October 16, 2026 15:00 UTC. That is 20:30 IST on the same day, in case you want to know whether your evening is about to get interesting.
Meanwhile 2026-10 releases on 1 October 2026, and the current stable version is 2026-07, released 1 July 2026. So there are four supported stable versions right now and you have somewhere comfortable to land.
Who does this actually affect?
Anything that talks to Shopify programmatically pins a version. That includes more things than most merchants realise.
| What you have | Risk level | Who usually fixes it |
|---|---|---|
| Public apps from the App Store | Low | The app developer, usually already done |
| Custom app built for you by an agency | High | Nobody, unless you ask |
| ERP or accounting sync | High | Your ERP vendor, if they are still responsive |
| 3PL or warehouse integration | High | The 3PL's tech team |
| Headless storefront | Medium | Whoever maintains the frontend |
| Internal scripts and automations | Very high | The person who left |
That last row is not a joke. The most common breakage we see is a Python or Node script somebody wrote to sync stock or pull a daily report, running on a server nobody logs into, pinned to a version that is about to disappear. It works perfectly right up until it does not, and then inventory quietly stops updating.
If you have an ERP connection in particular, this is worth a phone call this week. We have written before about what actually breaks in Shopify ERP integrations, and version drift is one of the recurring causes.
How do you find out if you are affected?
You do not have to guess. Shopify tells you, in two places.
First, the admin shows warnings when a connected app is calling deprecated resources. The documentation notes that warnings persist in the admin until seven days after the last detected use of deprecated resources, which means if the warning is there, something is still calling it right now.
Second, if you or your developer have API access, every response Shopify sends back carries headers that tell you which version handled the request. A developer can pull a day of logs and get you a definitive list in under an hour. This is not a big job. It is a small job that nobody has been asked to do.
The practical version for a non technical merchant is this: make a list of every system that touches your Shopify data, then ask each vendor one question. Which API version are you calling, and have you moved off 2025-10.
How do you verify what a vendor tells you?
Vendors answer this question optimistically. Not dishonestly, usually, but the person replying to your email is rarely the person who maintains the integration, and there is a difference between we support the latest version and your specific connection has been updated.
Three ways to check without taking anyone's word for it. Ask for the exact version string they call, not a reassurance, because 2026-07 is an answer and we stay current is not. Ask when the change was deployed to your store specifically. And if you have a developer, have them look at the response headers on a live call, which settle the question in seconds.
There is one more place version numbers hide that catches people out. Webhook subscriptions carry their own API version, separate from whatever your app calls directly. A store can have a fully migrated integration and still have webhooks registered against a retiring version, which produces the worst failure mode of all, because webhooks fail silently. Nothing errors on your screen. Orders just stop triggering whatever they were supposed to trigger.
What happens to apps that miss the deadline?
For public apps the consequences are stated plainly in Shopify's docs. If your app continues to use unsupported resources after the upgrade deadline, it is delisted from the Shopify App Store. Installation gets blocked for a minimum of seven days.
For a custom app built only for your store, there is no delisting because there is no listing. There is just an integration that stops returning data. No email, no grace period, no support ticket that fixes it for you.
That asymmetry is why custom apps are the real risk here. Public app developers have commercial pressure to stay current. Your bespoke integration has nobody applying that pressure except you.
How long does a version migration take?
It depends entirely on what changed between your version and the one you move to, and the honest answer is that most migrations are smaller than merchants fear.
A straightforward jump from 2025-10 to 2026-07 on an integration that reads orders and updates inventory is often a configuration change plus testing. A day of work, most of it verification.
It gets longer when the integration uses resources that were changed or removed between versions, when it was written against the REST Admin API rather than GraphQL, or when there is no test environment and every change has to be made carefully against live data.
Worth knowing for anyone planning ahead: the REST Admin API has been a legacy API since 1 October 2024, and since 1 April 2025 all new public apps must be built exclusively with the GraphQL Admin API. If your integration is REST based, a version bump is a short term fix and a GraphQL rewrite is the real conversation.
What should you do in the next week?
Four steps, and the first three cost you nothing but attention.
- Open your Shopify admin and look for deprecation warnings on your apps. If there are none, your exposure is probably limited to things outside the admin.
- Write down every system connected to your store. Include the ones you forgot, the reporting script, the old stock sync, the abandoned integration from a vendor you stopped using.
- Email each vendor the same sentence. Please confirm which Shopify API version you call and whether you have migrated off 2025-10.
- For anything custom, get a developer to check the actual calls rather than trusting documentation that may be a year out of date.
Do this before 16 October, not on it. If something does need work, you want the discovery to happen while there is still time to schedule the fix calmly.
Why does Shopify keep doing this?
Because the alternative is worse. A platform that never retires anything accumulates every decision it has ever made and slows down permanently.
The quarterly release and annual retirement cycle is predictable, which is the important part. It means this is a recurring calendar item, not an emergency. Version 2026-01 retires in January 2027, 2026-04 in April 2027, and so on. Once someone owns this in your business, it stops being scary and becomes a twenty minute check every quarter.
The merchants who get hurt are never the ones who knew about the cycle. They are the ones who did not know there was a cycle.
Is this a good moment to audit the rest of your stack?
Usually yes, because you are already making the list. Most stores we look at are carrying at least one integration nobody uses, one app still charging monthly for a feature that was replaced by something native, and one automation whose purpose nobody remembers.
The version audit gives you the inventory. What you do with it is a separate decision, and we have written about that process in how to audit your Shopify app stack.
Where this leaves you
16 October 2026, 15:00 UTC. Between now and then, the only question that matters is whether anything you depend on still calls 2025-10.
If you do not know the answer, that is the finding, and it takes a developer about an hour to turn into a definitive list.
If you would rather someone just checked for you, send us your store URL and a list of what is connected to it. We will tell you what is pinned to a retiring version and what it would take to move it. If nothing is at risk, we will tell you that too and you can stop thinking about it.