Has Shopify abandoned Hydrogen?

[Reiss-Cashmore]

What is the location of your example repository?

https://github.com/Shopify/hydrogen

Which package or tool is having this issue?

Hydrogen

What version of that package or tool are you using?

2025.7.0

What version of Remix are you using?

No response

Steps to Reproduce

I want to ask the question: Has Shopify abandoned Hydrogen?

Repo Activity
The activity in the repo the past few months has basically ground to a halt - the September release was focused on a miniflare v3 upgrade, a version that has been out for over two years with v4 already out in the wild - not to sound ungrateful but not exactly a display of being on the leading edge or the future of shopify development.

The only maintainer with any recent activity in the project is @juanpprieto who by their own admission is no longer working on Hydrogen

Languishing Library Support
Vite 7 still not supported in mini-oxygen - React 19 still not supported, was stable in december. React 18 stopped being actively developed on the same date and hasn't had a release since April - just a few short months ago it seemed that a React 19 upgrade and other build libs was very much on the roadmap:

#2841 (comment)

However seemingly the upgrade branch has been abandoned #3024 and the maintainer that mentioned that being on the roadmap isn't with the project any more. Is this being picked up?

Developers are giving you plenty of signals that this is something that needs attention: #2841 #3263

Demo Project Abandoned
Hydrogen demo store horrendously out of date - Stuck on tailwind v3 and needs attention - I have done my best to bring this demo up to date with the versions of libraries in the hydrogen-react library here: Shopify/hydrogen-demo-store#112

Aggressive Issue Closing
The only reason there are so few issues is because the bot is because since october there was an aggressive setting set to automatically close issues there should be 2-3x more valid issues than there actually are:
After searching for 10 minutes you can see the following issues should never have been closed: #2644, #2579, #2578, #2564, #2560, #2557, #2507, #2497, #2489, #2485, #2825, #2820, #2756 - The list goes on, this was just one page of the recently closed issues. Are you guys just burying your head in the sand now?

Roadmap Comments
These comments give me some hope that there actually is a plan:
#2841 (comment)

#2862 (comment)
#2317

But what exactly is going on over there? Can anyone actually shed some light from the Shopify team on what your plan or roadmap is for Hydrogen. How can you expect any developers/architects/tech leads to be beginning enterprise projects on top of such a shaky foundation? If you are not going to be actively developing this any more, which the evidence seems to support, can you come out and say so...

Tagging all the recent contributors in the hopes of getting this in front of someone still working on this

@ruggishop @kdaviduik @balazsbajorics @blittle @rorytanner @seanparsons

Expected Behavior

Start communicating with your developers about the future of this framework

Actual Behavior

...

[obinecko]

Well said! Hopefully someone will respond to this soon.

[benjaminsehl]

👋 Hey @Reiss-Cashmore — I was the PM on Hydrogen on day 0, and it's back under my umbrella again now.

This post deserves a more thorough reply, so I'll follow up soon (likely tomorrow) — but I wanted to quickly acknowledge this so you weren't left hanging. Thanks also for the PR to the demo store — we'll take a look at that, really appreciate the contribution.

The short answer to your question is no, we're not abandoning it — Hydrogen is very important to Shopify. That said, yes — you're right that we're in a transition period, and having been a merchant and Shopify partner for most of my career, I totally appreciate that would make you anxious and hesitant to build with us.

[benjaminsehl]

Hey again, @Reiss-Cashmore !

So again, let me say this clearly: Hydrogen is here to stay. Our adoption growth continues to be extremely high. It's a really important product for us.

That said, I completely acknowledge that we have some work to do to clean things up.

A lot has changed over the last couple years: Remix evolved into React Router 7, Vibe coding became a thing, and Hydrogen went from being a "new" way to go headless to the "main" way to go headless on Shopify. That shift means our focus is changing from proving the concept to perfecting the craft.

Over the last four years, we've built out a lot of great tools that developers rely on, and we also moved really quickly. Now that our key dependencies are stable, our priority is refinement. We’re doing deeper work to simplify and clean things up. That started with moving to React Router 7, and ripping out our own workerd implementation of "MiniOxygen" (a fork of Miniflare) in favor of the Cloudflare workerd-based Miniflare.

So, where are we at now?

So first up, I should say that you’re not going to see the same evolution of the product that you saw in the early parts of the contribution graph. This is a feature, not a bug.

Hydrogen is a toolkit; React Router is the framework. We want to keep our toolkit focused, stable, and you should only need to reach for it when it’s going to provide you value.

The point of headless is control, and so we’re not here to over-build a product that takes away from that. We are going to build features that remove the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” from things like variant pickers and cart state. However, you’ll only really see big changes in this repo when new platform features come out from Shopify that benefit from us building some tooling around them.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t work to be done.

Right now we have under-the-hood cookie improvements in flight. It’s not glamorous, and it’s hard stuff to get right.

The other thing we're actively working on is making Hydrogen a great toolkit and stack for LLM-centric development. Early on, we had to make things self-documenting and add CLI configurations to reduce friction. Now we can strip away that complexity and make Hydrogen work the way modern development actually happens. That starts with work that's not directly in this repo, but is very much impactful to the product: supporting Hydrogen merchants with Storefront MCP, the Shopify Catalog, and adding support for Dev MCP.

Next, after those are shipped, we’re coming back to this package to do a lot of polish and simplification. Take a look at our packages and see for yourself that this could be a lot cleaner, smaller, and simpler. Things like React Router 7’s Middleware will really help here.

Our Demo Store has grown long in the tooth as a symptom of that complexity, and so I do want to come back and clean that up too; though, first we’ll be refining the Skeleton template. (I’ll gladly merge your PR if it gets us closer!)

That will also put us in a place where it will be a lot easier to make quick releases, and so we’ll be able to stay up to date with the Storefront API easily and ship updates right when a new version comes out. This takes too long today, and developers shouldn’t be waiting this long for official support.

From there, there’s a few specific things I’m keen to dig into:

1. Simplified Analytics integration and (ideally) adding support for non-Hydrogen headless stores.
2. Moving to client-side carts by default (still preserving SSR) to make it simpler to do full page caching.
3. Better integration with Markets, especially with respect to supporting domain configurations that are set in the Admin. This should also come with a nicer happy path for i18n as a whole.

There’s a few other bigger pieces I can’t talk about yet, but I'm pretty excited about in the year to come. First though, we need to get the foundation right.

On top of all of this, we’ve restructured the team, creating one larger developer tools team that can own the full DX no matter how you build on Shopify and keep that feeling unified and great across the board. We’ve got some work to do there, as you pointed out; this is a transition, but we are invested.

I had hoped that we could show with actions rather than words, but you beat me to the punch. That said, I'm really grateful for you reaching out about this.

If there are things you think could be improved about Hydrogen or you have some ideas on what’s missing from the toolkit today, I’d love to chat. Please do DM me on X, and let’s hop on a call: x.com/benjaminsehl

Cheers,

Ben