A new era for content applications with Sanity App SDK

Written by Simeon Griggs

Over the last few years, I've shipped over a dozen plugins and written thousands of words of tutorials and lessons on how to customize Sanity Studio.

The Sanity App SDK is the toolkit I have always wanted.

What was always possible is now far simpler with the Sanity App SDK. Until now, building your own content experiences meant building them inside Sanity Studio and having to recreate the Studio's UX.

The Sanity App SDK distills the behaviors authors expect—live updating document lists, automatically creating drafts, multiplayer editing—and into reusable hooks for developers to build novel content applications rapidly.

With this UI baked in, you're free from technical overhead to build impressive content applications that solve for content creators' needs for immediate business impact. Build fit-for-purpose applications instead of trying to mutate a cookie-cutter CMS into something it was never meant to be.

The App SDK welcomes developers to an ambitious future that is less about prying apart Sanity Studio code and instead about building entirely new content experiences, faster than ever.

Content operations are jobs to be done

With Sanity Dashboard (the new "home screen" of the Content Operating System), the content apps you build can be deployed independently to operate across projects and datasets.

Our team has over eight years of experience building real-time content editing experiences for content creators. The App SDK is our way of distilling all we've learned into a distributed library for developers and the content creators they empower.

It's time to build, not just configure

The primary way to work with Sanity content has always been the Sanity Studio. Being truly "headless," it is built on the same APIs developers could use to make their applications perform queries and mutations using either the Sanity Client or the HTTP API.

However, Sanity Studio has a few opinionated user experience implementation details that authors come to expect, like the way editing a published document immediately creates a new draft or how a rendered list of documents stays updated in real-time.

It could be disorienting if you needed to build your own content review or editing experience, and what you built didn't work the same way.

So while developers have always loved Sanity Studio for its configurability and customizability, building entirely new experiences has been more difficult than we were ever happy with.

That changes now.

Introducing App SDK

Headless CMSes have only ever promised multi-channel to create multiple front-ends that query and display content.

Sanity App SDK fulfills the content operating system promise by allowing the creation of multiple content editing applications.

A toolkit for initializing apps

The Sanity CLI now contains a command to bootstrap a new Sanity app, which can be deployed to the Dashboard.