The starter frontend is targeted at new stores. I'm not sure if any thought has been put into the upgrade path for existing stores and I don't think that we should really accommodate that use case. It might be nice for those stores, but it could impair our ability to make further improvement to the starter frontend. The starter frontend is a starter because it generates all the frontend controllers in your application for use to use as a starting point and customize to your needs. Because the frontend was the primary thing new stores customized, and because those customizations were typically done with a lot of decorators, it made it near impossible for us to make any changes to the old frontend. Almost any change was basically guaranteed to break some store somewhere, and don't even think about touching any of the views. Who knows what people had done to those. I would recommend just sticking with solidus_frontend if that's where you're at. It's a stable platform that won't move under your feet. The effort of rebuilding your store on top of starter frontend probably won't be worth except maybe in the longest of long terms. This split was simply our solution to make it so the new frontend could be upgraded and changed without affecting existing stores. Sure, it would be nice if we could all build off a shared platform where new and existing stores alike could benefit from each new change, but in practice people simply customize their frontends too much for this to actually be possible.