[Maestrooo] Section Feed

We're sorry to hear about the inconvenience. Our app has indeed been restricted by Meta (owning company of Instagram), which caused this breakage. We're trying to reach them to get the app up and running but, as Meta doesn't have any contact form to reach them easily, we don't have a exact ETA on when the app will be back. We have, as a consequence, temporarily hide the app from the app store.

In the interim, we would recommend you to switch to a paid Instagram app from the App Store if showing the Instagram feed on your store is vital to your business.

EDIT: we're happy to let you know that Meta has re-enabled the access to the app. You should now be able to re-connect your Instagram account in the app to show your media.

Hello. We're sorry to hear about your bad experience. A few things to note though:

* The current issue impacting Section Feed is indeed due to Instagram ; our app has been revoked without prior notice, which suddenly leaded the app to stop working. We have unlisted the app so new merchants can't install it anymore, and we have currently re-submitted the app for validation against Instagram. Please note this usually take a few days. We will warn you once the app is reverted.

* Regarding our themes, this is unfair. Our theme is a paid product, while this app is a free product that we released to merchants for free, when Instagram blocked the ability for themes to directly get Instagram media. We developed and offer this app for free, we've never made a single dollar of revenue on it since its release a few years ago; this is an app that we maintain and develop on our free time. The app is being used by more than 30,000 merchants on Shopify, and we always decided to keep this app free, despite the high support cost and maintenance.

Also, as for any system that depends on a third-party (here Instagram), such issues might arise (this is the first time it has happened in 5 years), and while we're sorry about the inconvenience it is causing, please note that we're doing our best to try to have Instagram re-activate the app, so that it can be up and running.

But please do not compare this app to our themes, which is our paid product, developed by a different team, and supported by over 15 people in the company.

Thank you for your review. We are indeed facing a temporary outage, our app has been disabled temporarily by Instagram yesterday. We are working with them to make sure to restore it as soon as possible (hopefully this week). In the meantime I would recommend you to hide temporarily the section on your store.

We will let you know once it is restored. Thanks for your patience and sorry for the inconvenience this is causing to you.

Hi !

We're sorry to hear you are not being satisfied by the app. As said at support, after lengthy debugging, I found the issue was due to older custom code on your store. Basically, you have applied some code to "optimize" your store. Those optimizations broke some basic features of Shopify, such as loading apps properly, and therefore asked you to reach the developer or the app developer in charge of those changes.

I confirm with 100% confidence the issue was not due to our app. Our support does not cover fixing issues introduced by custom code (especially considering our app is completely free, so there is no risk in trying it and removing it if it would not work for you).

We're sorry to hear you're having a bad experience. However, we have been unable to find any support tickets related to your store PrimePepper. Can you please try to reach us again? Please also note that Section Feed is a free app that we're offering to customers, but please note that tickets for the free app are less priority (we try to answer within 48h instead of 24h for our paid themes).

Regarding our theme, we can see that you're using our theme Warehouse, but we can't find any support ticket associated with your store either.

We would, therefore, appreciate it if you could give us a bit more context here about your issues, as it feels a bit unfair here. You can reach our support here: https://support.maestrooo.com/article/203-contact-us

EDIT: we're happy to let you know that Meta has re-enabled the access to the app. You should now be able to re-connect your Instagram account in the app to show your media.

Thank you for your review and for using our app :). The connection with Instagram can indeed be disconnected automatically under some circumstances, such as if you modify the password of your Facebook or Instagram account. This is done automatically by Instagram (not by the app). Do not hesitate to reach us at support if you need more information.

Hi !
Unfortunately, this is a current limitation of the new Instagram API. It only returns images in high resolution, without the ability to get smaller versions. This is something we have asked Instagram team to add, but for now this feature has not been added on their end yet.

However, please note that while the app shows high resolution images, it uses lazyloading across the board, which means that the images are actually not loaded until they become visible to the user. The impact on performance is therefore reduce to the minimum. Rest assured that using Section Feed WILL NOT increase the initial loading time of your pages.

Thank you for your review.

We're sorry to hear the app did not match your expectations.

To be transparent with everyone, our app has be developed initially as a replacement for the old Instagram section that was removed by Instagram in 2020. While we did it for our theme users initially, we however decided to release it for free for everyone (and not only our theme users).
We have started to integrate it visually with some premium themes sold in the store (including themes not developed by us), but it is a long job to integrate every theme.
Covid caused a big spike of support for themes on our end and we therefore have little time for now to spend on this free app (which is something our team developed on their free time after their standard working hours).

We have released this app for free for the Shopify community, so it always feels a bit unfair to receive such feedback. We however hope to be able to support more themes in the future!