Apptile Web Tunnel — Theme App Extension (App Embed) Setup

The current settings and steps for enabling Apptile Web Tunnel on your Shopify storefront.

This is a developer SDK. Apptile Web Tunnel is a bridge library, not a merchant-facing feature. It is available only to Enterprise customers who are building a custom mobile app on top of the Apptile SDK, and it must be wired up by your development team. If you are a standard Apptile merchant using our off-the-shelf mobile app, you do not need to enable this — everything Web Tunnel powers is already handled for you inside the app.

Web Tunnel installs a small script on your Shopify storefront that exposes a window.Apptile JavaScript bridge. When your storefront is loaded inside a custom mobile app built with the Apptile SDK, the bridge lets your app and web layer share state — cart, wishlist, customer session, navigation, and custom data — over a postMessage channel. On a normal browser, or inside any app that is not built on the Apptile SDK, the bridge sits idle and has no user-visible effect.

Step 1 — Confirm You Need Web Tunnel

You are on an Apptile Enterprise plan.
Your team is building or maintaining a custom mobile app using the Apptile SDK, and that app renders your Shopify storefront in an embedded WebView.
Your developers plan to consume the window.Apptile.cart, wishlist, navigation, customer, app, or data namespaces from within your web layer.

If any of these is not true, stop here — Web Tunnel is not the right tool for your setup. Email support@apptile.com if you're unsure.

Step 2 — Enable the App Embed on the Storefront (Shopify Theme Editor)

In your Shopify Admin, go to Online Store → Themes.
Next to your live theme, click Customize.
In the left rail of the theme editor, click App embeds (the puzzle-piece icon).
Find Apptile Web Tunnel in the list and toggle it on.
Click Save at the top right.

There are no block settings to configure — enabling the toggle is the entire setup on the Shopify side.

Step 3 — Verify the Bridge Is Available

Open your live storefront on any device.
Open browser DevTools → Console.
Type window.Apptile and press Enter. The object should be defined; you'll see namespaces like cart, wishlist, navigation, customer, app, and data.
If your storefront is loaded inside your custom Apptile-SDK mobile app, window.Apptile.getIsEmbeddedInApp() should return true. On any other browser or app, it returns false — which is expected.

Step 4 — Integrate from Your Custom App

The full SDK reference, event schemas, and code samples for consuming the bridge from the native side of your app are provided as part of your Enterprise onboarding by your Apptile account manager. If you don't have access to those docs, email support@apptile.com.

Step 5 — Best Practices

Keep the embed toggled on at all times once your custom app is in production. Toggling it off silently breaks the bridge for every shopper already using your app.
The Web Tunnel script is loaded from Apptile's CDN and updates automatically. You do not need to re-deploy your theme when we ship improvements — but read our release notes so your native side stays compatible with any new event schemas.
Do not depend on window.Apptile from your web layer without a defensive typeof check. On the plain public web, it is not defined.

You're Ready

Web Tunnel is now enabled on your storefront. Your development team can integrate against the window.Apptile bridge from your custom mobile app.

Reminder: Web Tunnel is available only on Enterprise plans with a custom SDK-based mobile app. Questions, SDK access, or event-schema docs — email support@apptile.com.