This guide walks you from a fresh Shopify store to a binary in App Store review — usually about 45 minutes of clicks plus the time the stores take to approve. Six steps. No CLI required for steps 1–5.

1. Install Appolar in Shopify

Open your Shopify admin and search the Shopify App Store for Appolar. Click Install. Shopify will ask you to approve the read scopes Appolar needs (products, collections, customers, orders) and the write scopes (push campaigns, app metadata).

You'll land in the Appolar workspace inside your Shopify admin. Nothing is published yet — the next steps are configuration only.

2. Pick a starter preset

Presets are starting points — a curated combination of colors, font, and per-screen layouts. Loading a preset never locks you in; once it's applied you can edit every token and every block.

• Preset A

  Apparel

  Editorial home, large product imagery, lookbook tabs.

• Preset B

  Beauty

  Routine builder, ingredient overlays, refill push hooks.

• Preset C

  Lifestyle

  Story-led home with mixed media blocks and collection grids.

• Preset D

  Food & Bev

  Subscription-first layout, reorder push, native bundles.

3. Set your theme tokens

Every component in the app reads from your tokens. Change the brand color once and every button, chip, and active-tab indicator across iOS and Android updates immediately in the live preview.

Brand color

Pick a single brand color. Appolar derives the press state, the disabled state, and the dark-mode variant from the value you set — no manual contrast checks required.

Font family

Choose one of the 10 curated fonts on the Builder > Theme screen. Custom font uploads are not supported — see Theme tokens for the full rationale.

4. Connect developer accounts

Your app ships under your Apple Developer and Google Play Console accounts. From Builder > Publishing upload your App Store Connect API key (.p8) and Google Play service-account JSON. Appolar encrypts both at rest with AES-256-GCM.

# What you upload, in order:
1. AuthKey_XXXXX.p8 # Apple App Store Connect API key
2. play-service-account.json # Google Play console

# Neither file is ever shown to you again after upload —
# rotate from your Apple / Google consoles, then re-upload.

5. Trigger your first build

Click Build my app in the top right of the Appolar workspace. Shopify shows the standard subscription approval prompt; once approved, Appolar hands the build off to EAS Build.

The first build typically takes 12–18 minutes for iOS and 8–12 minutes for Android. You can close the tab — the workspace will email you when both binaries are ready.

6. Submit to the stores

From the Builds tab, click Submit to App Store and Submit to Play Console. Appolar uses your credentials to upload directly to the listing draft you have in App Store Connect and Play Console.

Apple review typically takes 24–48 hours. Google Play review is usually under 24 hours for the initial submission and under 2 hours for updates. Once approved, your app is live.

That's the whole loop. The rest of these docs go deeper into the builder, push notifications, analytics, and publishing — use the sidebar to jump in.