Is Shopoify's Polaris used for styling themes or only for creating Custom/Public apps?

Question

It's not clear to me whether a designer would adhere to Polaris specs if they were developing a custom theme for the Shopify store. Would they base it off of the file structure in Shopify sections, snippets, etc. or does Polaris provide something better?

Answer 1

Polaris is used only for Apps since it provides a similar style to the Shopify admin.

That said you can use it in a theme if you want to use similar styled elements as the admin, but coding a whole theme using Polaris will look a little back-end if you understand what I mean.

The idea of Polaris is to make Apps look similar to the Shopify admin design so that users are not faced with the color of the rainbow when they open a random app in their shopify panel.

All Polaris design guidelines and components are written for Apps and not themes.

So yes, you can use it on a theme, but No I don't recommend it.