Releasing AddThis on Cloudflare Apps: Making Disciplined Product Design Decisions

This post details the process of building and deploying the AddThis Share Buttons app on the Cloudflare Apps platform. It highlights the product design decision to pare down the full AddThis feature set to a simpler 'Share Buttons Lite' version for faster market entry and user feedback. The technical implementation involved using Cloudflare's suggested INSTALL_SCOPE JS technique to save unique configuration settings on a JS global variable and leveraging the AddThis Smart Layers API to render tools from this variable. This approach allowed for saving tool configuration data (layout, color, theme) without requiring users to create or log in to an AddThis account, demonstrating a practical solution for managing per-user settings within the Cloudflare Apps environment.