Shopify Dev Dashboard: Why Your Agency Can't Access Your Store (and How Collaborator Requests Actually Work)

You have hired a Shopify agency. They asked for access, you approved a collaborator request last week, and now they are telling you they still cannot see your apps, or that they need a staff account instead. It feels like stalling, or a sign the agency does not know what it is doing.

Usually it is neither. Shopify moved app management out of the Partner Dashboard and into a new Dev Dashboard during 2026, and the access rules changed with it. A collaborator account no longer gets your developer into the part of Shopify where custom apps live. This article explains what changed, what a Shopify Dev Dashboard collaborator request actually does, and what to ask any agency about Dev Dashboard access before you sign.

Shopify Dev Dashboard vs Partner Dashboard: what changed

For years, agencies worked on client stores from the Shopify Partner Dashboard. It held their client stores, their apps and their payouts in one place. Since 2025 Shopify has been moving all of that into the Dev Dashboard, piece by piece. The big step came on 25 September 2026, when Shopify shipped the redesigned Dev Dashboard with a unified apps index, a logs page, and app access requests handled inside it rather than in the Partner Dashboard. On 28 October 2026 the Partner Dashboard's settings and payouts pages followed. As of November 2026, app listings, pricing and App Store review still sit in the Partner Dashboard, but everything to do with building and installing apps does not.

There is a second change that matters more for you. Since 1 January 2026 you can no longer create a legacy custom app from your Shopify admin. Any new custom app, whether that is an ERP connector, a bespoke shipping rule or a small automation, has to be created in the Dev Dashboard. Existing custom apps keep working, but a deleted one cannot be recreated the old way. So if your agency needs to build or maintain anything custom (and we cover when a custom app is worth building separately), the Dev Dashboard is where the work happens.

Why a collaborator account no longer gets your agency into your apps

A collaborator account is Shopify's recommended way for a partner to reach a client store. Your agency requests access, you approve it, and you choose which parts of the admin they can see. Collaborators do not count towards your plan's staff limit, which is why agencies prefer them and why you should too.

The catch is that collaborator access is store-level. The Dev Dashboard sits at the organisation level, and access to it is controlled by your organisation's roles, not by the collaborator permissions you tick. When developers raised this on Shopify's developer forum in early 2026, Shopify staff confirmed there is no way to add a partner as an organisation-level collaborator with app development access. The recommendation was blunt: ask the merchant for a staff seat.

So when your agency says 'we can see your theme and orders but not your apps', that is Shopify working as designed, not the agency being difficult. It is also not necessarily permanent. Shopify has said it is looking at improvements, but there is no date, and you should plan around the rules as they stand.

Staff access and the App developer role

The fix is to add the developer as a staff user with the App developer role. Shopify's user permissions documentation describes this as the role that grants Dev Dashboard access inside a merchant store, and it has no access to production store data, financials or user management. Your developer can create, configure and install apps, and nothing else.

If you are on Shopify Plus you can go further and build a custom role that combines app development with a narrow set of store permissions. For most stores, the App developer role alone is the right starting point. Add store-level permissions separately if the agency also needs the theme editor or orders.

One honest trade-off. Staff seats count towards your plan's user limit, and on the Basic plan that limit is small. If you are tight on seats, that is a conversation to have with the agency, not a reason to hand over the store owner login. Never do that.

How a Shopify Dev Dashboard collaborator request actually works

For everything other than app development, a collaborator request is still the right route. Here is the sequence, from both sides, based on Shopify's current collaborations documentation.

Your agency opens the Dev Dashboard, goes to Stores, and selects Request store access.They enter your permanent myshopify.com URL. Custom domains do not work here, so send them the .myshopify.com address, not your branded one.They enter your 4-digit collaborator request code. Shopify now switches these codes on by default for every store. You find yours in your admin under Settings, then Users, then Security. If the agency already has one of its own apps installed on your store, Shopify lets them skip the code.If the code is wrong, the agency sees an error and no request reaches you. If it is right, the request lands in Settings, Users, under Requests.You open the request, check the permissions they have asked for, trim anything unnecessary, and select Accept request. Only the store owner or a user with the Administrator role can do this.

Two details worth knowing. Regenerating your code invalidates the old one but does not remove collaborators you have already approved, so rotate it freely after a project ends. And the code is not access. Sending it to someone only lets them ask. You still approve, and you still choose the permissions.

What to ask a prospective agency before you sign

Do you work from the Dev Dashboard? An agency still describing the Partner Dashboard flow for apps has not done this recently.Which permissions will you request, and why each one? A collaborator request that ticks every box is lazy. Senior teams ask for what the brief needs.If you need to build a custom app, what will you ask for? The right answer is a staff seat with the App developer role, or the narrowest custom role that does the job.Who at your end will hold the access, and what happens when they leave? Named people, not a shared login.Will you remove your own access when the engagement ends? Good agencies do this without being asked.

These questions take five minutes and tell you a lot about how an agency will treat your store. We have been doing this for 12 years from Glasgow, across more than 100 projects, with a senior team and no outsourcing, and we would rather a client asked them than did not. If you are still weighing up whether you need an agency at all, our guide to agency vs freelancer vs in-house covers the trade-offs plainly.

A collaborator account gets your agency into your store. It does not get them into your apps. Knowing the difference saves a fortnight.

Access is a means, not the work

It is easy to lose two weeks to access admin. Requests stuck pending, the wrong URL, a code that was regenerated and not shared. None of that grows your store. The reason to sort it quickly is so the real work can start, and for most established Shopify brands we talk to in the UK, that work is conversion. They do not have a traffic problem. They have a product page, checkout or navigation problem, and the app and theme changes that fix it all need a developer who can actually get in.

If you need a developer on hand for app maintenance, access questions and the steady run of Shopify platform changes, that is what our Shopify support and maintenance service covers. If you want that effort pointed at revenue, our Conversion Growth Retainer pairs the same team with a structured testing programme. Either way, the first thing we send is a collaborator request with the minimum permissions and a plain explanation of each one.

The takeaway: for theme, content and orders work, approve a collaborator request with trimmed permissions. For anything involving custom apps, add a staff seat with the App developer role. If any of this is new to the agency you are talking to, get in touch and we will walk you through it.