When to Create a Separate App - Stardeck Documentation

Start from the product boundary, not from the communication mechanism. Most of the time, one product should be one Stardeck app with Surfaces for distinct audiences and devices. A second app is the exception.

Surfaces first

Different audience or device alone usually means a Surface, not another app:

Need	Prefer
Customer site + staff admin	Surfaces in one app
POS on an iPad + kitchen display	Surfaces in one restaurant system
Marketing site + customer portal	Surfaces in one booking product
Public storefront + internal ops console	Surfaces with different access postures

Those experiences share product ownership, data, and release cadence. Keeping them together avoids duplicate deploys, duplicated validation, and unnecessary cross-app wiring.

When a second app earns independence

Create a separate Stardeck app when at least one of these is true:

Boundary	Example
Separate product	An independently owned accounting product next to your storefront
Tenant or ownership boundary	A partner-operated fulfillment system your team does not own
Different data model	Systems that would only share occasional events, not the same core tables
Different release cadence	A product that must ship and roll back independently of the first

If none of those apply, keep the work in the current app and add a Surface or (with Alpha access) a Module.

Decision table

Question	Same app	Separate app
Same product ownership?	Yes	No
Same core data model and day-to-day release train?	Yes	No
Mainly a different audience or device?	Surface	—
Needs its own launch URL / icon / access posture?	Surface	Only if the product itself is independent
Would you want to ship or pause them independently?	Rarely	Yes

After you decide they are separate

Only once the systems are genuinely independent, choose how they share work:

Shared Data Store — when separate apps truly need the same underlying tables. See Data Stores.
Cross-app communication — when independent apps need to call each other’s APIs or trigger actions. See Cross-App Communication and Cross-App Calls vs Shared Data Stores.

Do not start at those mechanism pages for tightly coupled experiences. Decide the product boundary here first.

​Surfaces first

​When a second app earns independence

​Decision table

​After you decide they are separate

Surfaces first

When a second app earns independence

Decision table

After you decide they are separate