The future of Dawn: Advocacy for continued development and native feature expansion

[salvymc]

Hey everyone! 👋

I wanted to start a conversation about the future of Dawn. We all know it’s the gold standard for Shopify OS 2.0—it’s fast, clean, and the go-to foundation for millions of stores and developers alike.

However, let’s be real: the e-commerce landscape is moving fast. Dawn shouldn't stay "just" a minimal starter theme. Merchants constantly ask for features that are now industry standards, and it’s a bit frustrating to see them forced to install heavy third-party apps (that tank PageSpeed) or pay for custom dev work for features that should probably be out-of-the-box by now.

A quick example? Color variant swatches on product cards.
I’ve just implemented this manually via Liquid (including an overflow "+N" counter), and it works like a charm. It’s lightweight, improves UX instantly, and proves that Dawn can handle these modern UI elements natively without sacrificing its "lean and mean" philosophy.

My point is: Let’s advocate for Dawn to remain a living product. It’s the heart of the Shopify ecosystem and it deserves to stay at the cutting edge by integrating those "standard" features we all end up coding manually anyway.

What do you guys think? What are the "must-have" features you’re tired of seeing handled by apps that you’d love to see natively in Dawn? 🚀

[mufftee]

My point is: Let’s advocate for Dawn to remain a living product. It’s the heart of the Shopify ecosystem and it deserves to stay at the cutting edge by integrating those "standard" features we all end up coding manually anyway.

Vintage was it before. The main challenge here is backwards compatibility. Just with the new color palettes i dont see really a way to migrate the old color schemes with the new color palettes as a merchant can have several. In that case there need to be different settings which do pretty much the same. This will create another level of complexity for the maintainers as well and confusion for the merchants.

Sometimes its not worth to hold on, on old stuff. I know.. i know...

I am not a fan of the closed source of the horizon, but with all the new features that shopify provided and will provide this is a battlefield in Dawn.