Announcing all Support apps to be responsive by default

Announced on	Rollout date
June 6, 2022	August 5, 2022

What's changing?

With the release of context panel resizing, Zendesk introduced the flexible property in the app manifest file. Moving forward, apps in the ticket sidebar and new ticket sidebar locations with an unspecified flexible property will be assumed to be responsive by default. Responsive apps automatically resize to match the panel width as it changes. Learn more about the new flexible property here.

Current behavior

• If flexible = true, then your app will dynamically resize to take up the width of the entire context panel, when the width of the context panel is adjusted by an agent. 
• If flexible = false, then your app will continue to honor the default width of 320px, even when the context panel is resized by agents to be larger or smaller than 320px
• If the flexible property is unspecified in the manifest, then Support frontend defaults to flexible = false for your app.  

New behavior

Now, if the flexible property is not specified in the manifest, the Support frontend defaults to flexible = true, instead of flexible = false.

Why is Zendesk doing this?

This default makes it easier for your apps to be responsive with the layout and to provide a better user experience when adjusting the panels. You don't need to add any settings to the manifest to make this happen. 

What do I need to do?

The flexible property is only available for the ticket sidebar and new ticket sidebar locations at this time. If your app doesn't appear in these locations, no action is required.

If your app appears in the ticket sidebar or new ticket sidebar, specify a flexible property in the manifest file. See here for a quick reference to navigating to your app's manifest file.

Ultimately, we want developers to make their apps responsive with flexible = true. If you're unable to do this, use flexible = false. 

If you want your app to stay fixed in place to the default width of 320px at all times, ensure that flexible = false is specified in the manifest file.

Once the manifest file is updated, you should redeploy to sync the change. From there you can upload your app to Zendesk to give agents access.