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Solo dev ships support chat widget across seven platforms, details what each really takes

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A solo developer building DeskCrew, an AI-powered support helpdesk, this week distributed a single chat widget across seven platforms including WordPress, Shopify, npm frameworks, Discourse, and Framer. Each platform required a different delivery mechanism, review process, and presented its own technical pitfalls. On npm, a silent auth failure caused a misleading 404 error instead of a 401, while Shopify's review was unexpectedly smooth because the app requested zero API scopes, qualifying it for a faster track. Discourse required no marketplace submission at all — just a public GitHub repo that forum admins can install directly. The developer documented the full process to fill a gap left by platform marketing pages, which rarely explain the real-world friction involved in multi-platform distribution.

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