What is ServiceNow Store (google search trend)

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety.

Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length.

And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important. — Gary Provost

ServiceNow Store Apps are applications that have been developed and made available for sale through the ServiceNow Store. These apps are designed to enhance and extend the features and capabilities of the ServiceNow platform and can range from automation and integration tools to custom user interfaces, data analysis, and more.

Back in 2015 ServiceNow started using this “store” to release at a quicker cadence. I have tried a few times to wrap my brain around how this all works and this is my rough notes.

Let’s first address “Why” the store is a thing.

Why

1. You can build your solutions with your Intellectual Property without concerns because of the protection policy functionality where you can hide your work in a private way.
2. Protect your global scope from these 3rd party applications because you need to explicitly add allowable access for them.
3. Source control in addition to a customer application repo to add another way to deploy your work.

Current state (2023)

Today there’s ~2200 applications on the store and 600+ of them are from ServiceNow proper. The reason I believe ServiceNow uses the store to release some of these applications’ vs using a family release lets them push things out more frequently.

From what I’ve gathered the store apps need to sell for at least ~$1000/mo unless it’s “free”. Most apps however do not list their pricing and payments via the store are something I’ve only heard complaints about, however my sample size is small and biased, if you’d had great experiences as a customer paying for services via the store or a vendor and receiving payment via the store, I want to hear from you. Reach out to me!.

These store releases are not “tied” to family releases anymore. They might be dependent on them. ServiceNow uses family releases as a marketing event. I think there was 1-2 things in the Vancouver release NOT in the store. I suspect the Family releases will continue to get smaller and smaller.

Notable things to watch

There is no “curated” feed to subscribe to get updates on the store. You can follow Justin Meadows to get weekly updates on store updates but in my opinion it just is too much to track individually.