Zoho Creator Developer Console | Improved Distribution and Lifecycle Management for apps

Zoho Creator Developer Console | Improved Distribution and Lifecycle Management for apps

Hello everyone,

We're excited to introduce new enhancements now in the Zoho Creator Developer Console. These updates strengthen private app distribution through licensing controls and extend environment support across all installed apps, helping teams test changes safely before going live.

What is private sharing?
Private sharing of apps gives you the flexibility to distribute your apps directly to specific clients using their Zoho email address. This is especially useful for developers and Partners who want to deliver tailored solutions to select customers.

Why this matters
Many of our Partners would like to distribute applications directly to clients and manage payments offline. Until now, Zoho Creator had no in-product mechanism to enforce app validity based on your payment or agreement status with clients. This meant that even if a client stopped renewing their license, the application remained fully functional in their account.
This new enhancement solves that issue by allowing Partners to define a clear validity period. Once expired, the app automatically becomes disabled, and the Partner gains the ability to block access fully. This protects your IP and ensures fair usage of your apps.

Additionally, there was previously no way to share apps for evaluation purposes. With this update, the Trial License feature enables developers to offer a time-bound preview before subscription.

While Developer Console already supported private sharing, we recognized that the existing flow was limited and didn't fully address the diverse requirements of our Partners. That’s why we've rolled out this new update to make the flow more robust and professional.

Here's how the new flow works:
  1. Evaluation: You can now offer your client a Trial License for your app. Once the client is added and the app is shared with a trial license, they'll receive an installation email. After they install the app using the provided link, it becomes available in their Creator account for the trial period.

  2. Post-evaluation: If an agreement isn't reached, the application will be disabled after the evaluation period ends. This means the app will switch to read-only mode, where the client would have access to existing data but won't be able to add new entries. At any point after the trial period expired, the developer will have the option to delete the disabled application (along with its data) from the client's account.

  3. Subscription: Following the evaluation, if the client decides to proceed with a purchase, you can offer them a Subscription License after completing the transaction through your preferred channels. Based on your agreement, the subscription can be granted for as little as one month or set to lifetime validity.

    Once the subscription period ends, the application is automatically disabled and moved to read-only mode, allowing clients to view existing data but not perform any actions. If required, developers can further restrict the application, completely blocking client access. If the client and developer agree to extend the subscription, the app can be unblocked and access restored. 

    These safeguards ensure clients can't continue using your app beyond your agreed terms with the client, giving you complete control, since payments are handled outside Zoho Creator. 
 
To share applications with your clients:
  1. Navigate to the Clients section. Click the horizontal ellipsis icon next to a client and select Share Application.

  2. In the popup, you can choose the Application and the version to be shared with the client.
  3. Next, you can choose from two license types:
    Trial License: Provide your client with a trial period to evaluate the app. You can set the duration to 15, 30, or 60 days.

    Subscription License: Once you've finalized the subscription terms with your client, you can issue a subscription license. You have the option to set a fixed validity period in months (from 1 to 36) or grant lifetime access to the app.


Consequently, with the introduction of this new flow, we've implemented automated email reminders to keep clients informed about their subscription status and expiry timelines. Developers will be proactively notified about client subscription activity and upcoming license expirations. This ensures both parties stay in sync throughout the subscription lifecycle.

Documentation
To help you better understand these changes, we've provided comprehensive resources to assist you with the private sharing of applications. They can be accessed at the Understanding private distribution of apps help page.

Environment support for installed apps  
Along with the above enhancements, we're also introducing environment support for apps you've distributed. Your clients will now be able to add installed apps to environments and thoroughly test them in the staging environment before publishing them to production. This ensures the changes to apps are validated before they become accessible to end users.

This enhancement removes the earlier limitation that prevented distributed apps from being added to environments. Please note that while your clients can add distributed apps to environments, they will not have access to development. This continues our policy of protecting intellectual property and ensuring that developers remain in control of their apps.

For more information, visit the Installing and managing distributed apps help doc.

Timeline
These enhancements have already been rolled out and are now accessible to users in all DCs.

We believe this new enhancement to the private sharing feature will provide you with greater control and flexibility when distributing your Zoho Creator applications. We hope you love it!

We'll be back soon with more exciting updates, so stay tuned.

Regards,
The Zoho Creator Team

    • Sticky Posts

    • Introducing Zoho Creator's 2025 Release Projection 2

      Hello Creators! I'm Prakash, from the Creator product management team, and today I'm delighted to unveil our next set of features as part of Release Projection 2 for 2025. With thoughtful analysis and planning, we've curated powerful new capabilities

    • Zoho Creator - 2023 Release Projection 1

      Hello everyone! A very Happy New Year to you and your family. Hope you're all good and having a great time using Zoho Creator to make your lives easier and your businesses prosper. 2022 was an action-packed year for us at Creator, and we hope to continue

    • Zoho Creator User Group meetups in a city near you! - Oct - Nov, 2023

      Greetings from the Zoho Creator team! We're hosting a series of Zoho Creator meetups in various cities across the globe, and we'd love to meet you there! Our meetups are a great opportunity to network with industry peers, exchange ideas and best practices,

    • Zoho Creator - 2023 Release Projection 2

      Hello everyone! Time truly flies when you're having an incredible journey, and today we mark the completion of an eventful and action-packed six months. It feels like just yesterday when we embarked on this adventure together with the launch of our new

    • Upcoming Updates - August 2022

      Hi all, Greetings from the Zoho Creator team! Today we've got news for you on some exciting updates. And rest assured— there’s more to come! In this post, we'll be going over the upcoming features and improvements for this month as mentioned below. A

    • Recent Topics

    • Workdrive on Android - Gallery Photo Backups

      Hello, Is there any way of backing up the photos on my android phone directly to a specific folder on Workdrive? Assuming i have the workdrive app installed on the phone in question. Emma

    • Auto sync Photo storage

      Hello I am new to Zoho Workdrive and was wondering if the is a way of automatically syncing photos on my Android phone to my workdrive as want to move away from Google? Thanks

    • Is anyone experience missing functions in the new UI until hard refresh?

      The set of functions including search is almost always missing upon loading an app in the new UI. If you refresh, the functions return. (see second screenshot) Anyone else experiencing this?

    • Conversion Rate – Won Deals over Assigned Prospects

      Hello, I would like assistance configuring a KPI in Zoho Analytics titled: Objective of the calculation: Number of Won Deals divided by Total number of assigned prospects (not only converted prospects). Important clarification: The denominator must include

    • emailing estimates

      Shows up in the customer mail logs as sent but nobody is receiving them, even when I send them to myself I don't get them ??? Something wrong with the mail server or my end ?

    • Not receiving New Ticket Emails

      Hello! The company I work for uses the Zoho ticketing system, however, I've noticed I'm not receiving email notifications when new tickets are published. I have admin rights to see these tickets on Zoho Desk and respond to them, but am not receiving the

    • Can't update a field on a parent form from a child form's On Success workflow

      Title: Can't update a field on a parent form from a child form's On Success workflow Hi everyone, I'm building a simple Golf Lesson Tracker app and I'm stuck on what should be a basic operation — updating a number field on a parent form when a child form

    • Approvals in Zoho Creator

      Hi, This is Surya, in one of  my creator application I have a form called job posting, and I created an approval process for that form. When a user submits that form the record directly adding to that form's report, even it is in the review for approval.

    • Upload from Zoho Creator File Upload field to OpenAI Vector Store

      I’ve struggled for quite a while to get this working properly. For a long time we relied on Azure Functions as a workaround to handle file transfers between Zoho Creator and OpenAI Vector Stores. It worked, but added unnecessary infrastructure and complexity.

    • Allow Admin to Configure Report > More Options Button

      As an Admin, I want to configure the options of the Report > More Options button to improve UX and reduce Developer overhead. See attached screenshot. Original question posted here: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/community/topic/modify-standard-rep

    • Calendar start time limit

      Hi all, Has anyone found a magical way to filter calendar reports to start from, let's say 8:00, and not 0:00? Or at least to auto scroll there like Google Calendar for example?

    • Enable Free External Collaboration on Notecards in Zoho Notebook

      Hi Zoho Notebook Team, I would like to suggest a feature enhancement regarding external collaboration in Zoho Notebook. Currently, we can share notes with external users, and they are able to view the content without any issue. However, when these external

    • EU Problem

      Hi all, we've been facing issues with the Europe data center for two days. It's starting to disrupt our daily workflow. Any word on when this will be resolved?

    • Remove Profiles from "Forecast" Module

      How can I remove Profiles from My forecast Module? Image Below The only revenue generators are the VP's, and the Estimation Managers, and the Estimators subordinate to the Est. Managers. How can I remove the unused Profiles? Its frustrating to see them

    • How can I clone my website in order to try new templates?

      I want to try a new template for my existing Zoho website without the risk of changing the current site or accidentally publishing the wrong template. Therefore I thought a 'clone website'-option should be somewhere, but I can't find it. How do I try

    • Is it possible to update multiple work items at once?

      Hi, Is it possible to update the statuses/release tags of multiple work items at once? I came across this thread that says it's not possible at the moment, but it was related to the Sprints mobile app. Does this feature not exist in the website as well?

    • Custom Module Missing from Roles & Permissions List

      Hi Zoho Community, I created a new Custom Module in Zoho Expense. The module is fully built and I can see it in the Module Builder (Settings > Customization > Modules). However, I am unable to deploy this to my users because the module does not appear

    • Pivot Report Formula - using a today() variable

      Is it possible for me to use a value of today() in a formula on a pivot table? I'm trying to identify where the end date of a project is greater than the current date if("10. Projects (Zoho Projects).End Date" > today(), 'Yes', 'No') I get the error that

    • Custom view inconsistencies

      Why is "is not" missing from criteria, along with other comparison operators ??? It makes it almost impossible to build required custom views, I don't want "void" invoices listed & why on earth would "Void" invoices be showing when the criteria includes

    • Need Customer Item Inward Module along with QC

      Need Customer Item Inward Module along with QC 1. Using Transfer Orders hit the item balance sheet 2. Items without inventory it becomes difficult for tracking purpose. 3. Custom Modules become tedious to capture multiple items, item subforms are not

    • Zoho CRM Quotes – Subform and PDF/Writer Limitations

      Hello, I am encountering the following limitations in Zoho CRM Quotes: Custom product images cannot be uploaded in the subform – the image upload field cannot be added; only the file upload field is available. File upload placeholders cannot be used in

    • Apple Messages for Business in Omnichannel communications?

      Hello, Apple launched "Apple Messages for Business" but Zoho CRM or Zoho Desk don't appear in the list of possible integrators. Zoho already promotes https://www.zoho.com/crm/omnichannel.html Omni Channel integration, but Apple Messages does not yet appear.

    • Possible to Turn Off Automatic Notifications for Approvals?

      Hello, This is another question regarding the approval process. First a bit of background: Each of our accounts is assigned a rank based on potential sales. In Zoho, the account rank field is a drop-down with the 5 rank levels and is located on the account

    • Will be possible to create a merge mail template for products?

      Hi, we would need to create a mail merge template for products (native) module. Will be possibile? or do you have a smart solutions to merge products data with a mail merge? thanks Chris

    • Maximum incoming email (attachment size) limit

      I see that the maximum size of received emails can now be set to 20MB, however I'd still like to see it be larger. It's embarrassing when a client sends me an email with a large attachment and I can't receive it. 50, even 100 MB seems reasonable these

    • [Free Webinar] Learning Table Series - Multi-currency management in Zoho Creator

      Hello everyone, We’re excited to invite you to another edition of the Learning Table Series webinar. As you may already know, we've moved to a purpose-based approach in the Learning Table Series this year. Each session now focuses on how a Zoho Creator

    • LESS_THAN_MIN_OCCURANCE - code 2945

      Hi I'm trying to post a customer record to creator API and getting this error message. So cryptic. Can someone please help? Thanks Varun

    • Ranking by group in report

      Dears, I am new to Zoho Analytics and I would like to ask you guys help to creating a ranking column. Report type: Pivot Matter: I want to create a ranking column on the right of Percentage. This ranking is group by column Type, and ranking by Final Score/Percent.

    • How do I add a project template to a pre-existing project?

      Help....How do I add a project template to a pre-existing project? Right now I have to delete the old project, make a new one and add the project template at the time of creating the new project.

    • How to add line breaks in zoho.cliq.postToUser(...) message?

      In a CRM function using Deluge I'm sending this message and attempting to add some line breaks but they are ignored. Is there another way to add these breaks? My message: message: New urgent task\nDescription \nThis is a fake description.\n A new line?

    • Passing the image/file uploaded in form to openai api

      I'm trying to use the OpenAI's new vision feature where we can send image through Api. What I want is the user to upload an image in the form and send this image to OpenAI. But I can't access this image properly in deluge script. There are also some constraints

    • Users may not pick the fields to be shown as columns in the Choose Account window when creating a new Deal record

      Hi there, by talking with other users I found out that I, as an Admin, am the only one who can pick fields to be shown as columns in the Choose Account window when creating a new Deal record. In fact, if other users click on the "Add Column" symbol on

    • {Action Required} Re-authenticate your Google Accounts to Continue Data Sync

      Hello Users! To align with Google’s latest updates on how apps access files in Google Drive, we’ve enhanced our integration to comply with the updated security and privacy standards, ensuring safer and more reliable access to your data. With this update,

    • Why is the ability Customize Calls module so limited?

      Why can't I add additional sections? why can't I add other field types than the very limited subset that zoho allows? Why can I only add fields to the outbound/inbound call sections and not to the Call Information section?

    • Report Template - How to remove page break after each record?

      Hi, We have report template for a list report. It looks good at screen. But when printing, it creates a page break after each record. How to remove the it? So we can print multiple records in same page. Please look at the attached screenshots. Report Template Report Print Preview

    • Calendar report with order options and more quick view templates

      I think many of us regularly work with calendar-style reports. It would be great to be able to customize the quick view with new templates and have options to sort the entries for each day of the calendar by different criteria. I think this is an interesting

    • Sender Email Configuration Error.

      Hello Team, Hope you are all doing well. We are in the process of creating the Zoho FSM environment in the UAE. When we try to add the sender email address “techsupportuae@stryker.com”, we receive the error message: “Error occurred while sending mail

    • Shall we play a game?

      Presenting the very first game created using ZOHO Creator: Tic-Tac-Toe (or noughts and crosses) I made this to challenge myself and employ some of the new features of ZOHO Creator. I must admit that the code is very literal and not too elegant. There are plans to improve on the machine AI and streamline the code over time. Currently the code makes extensive use of functions for the machine "AI" - there are 12 of these.   The machine AI can be tricked, so to counteract that I made it exceedingly arrogant

    • Career site URL - Suggestion to modify URL of non-english job posting

      Hi, I would like to suggest making a few modification to career sites that are not in english. Currently, the URL are a mix of different languages and are very long. It makes for very unprofessional looking URLs... Here is an example of one of our URL

    • CRM notes

      I want to be able to add notes to a task that do not necessarily get rolled up into an account or contact.   For example, I tasks to work on a Court Order for John Doe divorce account.  There might be lots of updates (in the form of notes) that employees

    • Next Page