Migrating App Versions
Migrate your legacy apps to the new navigation and authentication.
Background
On February 12, 2025 we launched a brand new way to authenticate users to your application, create navigational headers and footers, and manage utility pages within Softr. Apps built before this date are considered legacy apps and use older headers, footers, and authentication settings. Migrating your app from legacy has several benefits, but is totally optional - your app will continue to work whether you migrate or not!
Video Explainer
Why should I migrate?
Now, you can migrate these legacy apps to take advantage of:
- Smoother user onboarding flows
- Easier setup of 401, 404, forgot password, and authentication in your apps
- More flexible navigation for tablet, mobile, and desktop
- More control over link and button visibility in navigation, headers, and footers
- Security features like session expiry
- … and more! Learn more in our Pages and Navigation doc!
Before You Migrate!
It’s important to understand some things before you migrate!
- Apps must be converted one-by-one.
- Not all blocks are compatible with the new app version (see Step 5 of this guide)
- A snapshot of your old app will automatically be saved, allowing you to revert back to it using the App History feature.
- If your application has very complex setup, we recommend that you create a new app to understand some differences between new and legacy app versions.
- If the signup on your legacy app requires lots of additional information to be gathered from the user, migrating may not be a good option just yet. Currently we don’t support collecting additional information at signup on new app versions, but this will be improved soon!
- On the new version, go to Users > Authentication to check whether all the settings follow what you had previously. Check out our User Authentication doc for more info.
How to Migrate
Step 1: Open the app you want to migrate
Legacy apps will have a “Legacy” tag on your Softr Workspace dashboard to show you which ones have not been migrated yet.
Step 2: Watch the amazing explainer video and follow the prompts
Note that this popup and video will only be shown once per legacy app, but you can still convert later if you want (Step 4)
Step 3: Wait for conversion and finish
After selecting “Start Converting”, your app will automatically convert. A success message will appear and Softr Studio will refresh when the conversion is complete. But you’re not quite done yet!
Step 4 (optional): Return and migrate later
If you decided to skip the popup and migrate at a later date, you can always migrate by clicking on the button in the lower right of Softr Studio. This will re-open the popup and you can complete Steps 1 through 3.
Step 5: Remove incompatible blocks and validate
After conversion, open the checklist in the bottom right of Studio to see if there are pages that contain old blocks that are no longer compatible with the new app version. Remove these blocks and validate the fix to complete the migration. These will probably be account, login/signup, and other blocks that the new app version handles automatically via Utility Pages.
Last updated on April 11, 2025