You can ship a full-screen, app-like brand experience without shipping an app. Try-on, quizzes, product finders, small games. It runs inside the Shop app, on phones that already have it, and it starts as a React project.
The Shop Minis SDK opened to developers in October 2025, and through 2026 Minis expanded across the Shop app's home feed and product pages. Distribution is the entire argument. You are not asking anyone to download anything, create an account, or approve a notification prompt. You are renting shelf space in an app tens of millions of shoppers already opened this week.
Getting started looks like any other front end job. Run npm init @shopify/shop-mini and you have a React environment with access to shopper context inside Shop. What you build should behave like a landing page with better manners: 1 job, done fast, almost no navigation. A shade finder for foundation. A fit quiz that ends in a cart. A limited drop that exists only inside the Mini for 48 hours. The customer taps, plays, buys, and never leaves the app they were already scrolling.
The catch is that discovery inside the Shop app is not yours. Placement in the feed is algorithmic, and a Mini nobody sees is a React project you paid for twice. You also inherit a second surface to maintain, with its own QA cycle, its own analytics gaps, and its own design constraints that will not match your theme. Budget for the next 2 versions, not just the launch, and decide up front what number would make you kill it.
Most merchants have not heard of Minis. That is not a reason to wait. It is the only reason the math works right now, because cheap shelf space is always a temporary condition and it is never announced when it ends.
