A forked path in a forest with a gravestone reading RIP App SDK at the fork, one path leads to a glowing toolbox with code, the other to a warm workshop
App SDK End of Life

October 31, 2026. That's when Rally's App SDK and Legacy Custom Pages stop working. If you've been putting off thinking about it, congratulations, you now have about seven months, and at least two of those will be eaten by vacation calendars and budget approvals.

Here's the thing nobody is telling you: you probably don't need to rebuild as many apps as you think.

Broadcom's official migration guidance says "rebuild your custom apps as Custom View widgets." That's not wrong, exactly. But it skips a step. Actually, it skips several steps. It's like telling someone who's moving to a new house to start packing boxes without first checking if half the stuff in the garage is already at Goodwill.

Let's walk through it properly.

Step 1: Figure Out What You Actually Have

Before you can migrate anything, you need a list. Not a guess, not a vague memory of "Dave built something for the Q3 reporting page in 2019", an actual list.

Rally shipped a tool for this. The Legacy Custom Pages admin page lets subscription and workspace admins search every custom page across the entire subscription. It rolled out in phases, search and view in Q1 2025, admin actions in Q2 2025, and visibility for all users in Q1 2026. We wrote about it here if you want the full timeline.

The admin page tells you what exists. But "what exists" and "what anyone actually uses" are very different questions, especially in a subscription that's been running for ten years. You'll want to export that list and start triaging.

We built a small tool to make that triage easier. It is not online yet, so if you want a hand running it against your own export, get in touch.

Step 2: Check If Rally Already Does It

This is the step Broadcom's migration docs skip entirely, and it's the one that could save you the most time and money.

A lot of custom apps were built five, six, eight years ago to fill gaps in Rally. Rally has been filling those gaps. Many of the apps on your list might be solving problems that Rally now handles out of the box.

Here are some common ones:

Custom Kanban boards. Rally has native Portfolio Kanban and Team Board pages now. If someone built a custom board in 2018 because the built-in one didn't have swimlanes or custom columns, go look at the current one before you start rebuilding.

Cumulative flow diagrams. Rally added built-in CFD widgets for both iterations and releases in 2025. If you've got a custom CFD app from the RallyCommunity days, it might be completely redundant.

Flow metrics and cycle time. Rally Insights now includes five built-in flow charts: throughput, WIP, cycle time, lead time, and flow efficiency. That custom analytics dashboard someone built? Check if Insights already covers it.

Dependency tracking. Rally added Cross Team Dependencies widgets in Q2 2025. If your custom dependency tracker was built because Rally couldn't visualize cross-team deps, it can now.

Scope change tracking. The Scope Change for Work Items widget shipped in Q1 2026. Brand new.

Blocked work tracking. There's a native Blocked Work widget, and Broadcom also released an endorsed widget version with more features.

You get the idea. Go through your list app by app and ask: "Does Rally just... do this now?" You might be surprised how many you can cross off.

Step 3: Check for Direct Replacements

For the apps that aren't covered by Rally's native features, the next question is whether there's a widget you can drop in without writing code.

Core widgets. Rally's Custom Views come with 21 built-in widgets, everything from Custom List and Custom Board to burndown charts, planning boards, and query tiles. Broadcom published an App SDK Alternatives page that maps old SDK apps to their Custom View equivalents. Start there.

Endorsed widgets. This is a new tier Broadcom introduced in Q1 2026, widgets built by Rally's own team, delivered as Custom HTML but vetted and supported. There are six so far, and they're open source on GitHub:

  • Blocked Work, replaces the legacy Blocked Work app
  • Context Text Field Editor, rich text editing on Custom Views
  • PI Cycle Time Chart, portfolio item cycle time with percentile whiskers
  • Recent Activity, replaces the legacy Recent Activity app
  • Test Set Results by Iteration, replaces the legacy test set tracking app
  • Timebox Dashboard, replaces both the Iteration Dashboard and Release Dashboard

If one of these covers your use case, you just paste the HTML into a Custom HTML Widget and you're done. The source code is right there.

Third-party widgets. There are also independent developers shipping Custom View widgets. Worth a look before you build from scratch.

Step 4: What's Left Is the Real Work

After you've crossed off the apps that Rally handles natively, and the ones that have a drop-in replacement, whatever's still on the list is yours to rebuild.

These are usually the apps that were built in-house using the App SDK for something specific to your organization. A custom reporting dashboard that pulls from LookbackAPI. A planning tool that talks to three different portfolio item levels. A metrics page that your VP looks at every Monday morning and would absolutely notice if it disappeared.

You have two options:

Build it yourself using the Custom HTML Widget. This is Rally's official path forward. The Custom HTML Widget gives you a container with WSAPI access, URL parameters, schema access, and scoping metadata. You write HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. It works.

But your old App SDK code won't run inside it. The App SDK is gone. No Rally.sdk, no ExtJS components, no built-in data stores or grid renderers. If you're migrating a complex app, you're starting from scratch.

Wouldn't it be nice if someone built a modern replacement?

A caveman in a cave dropping his stone chisel in surprise at the sight of a modern laptop showing a task management grid, with a chalk kanban board on the cave wall behind him

Introducing WidgetAI, our React + TypeScript SDK for building Rally Custom View widgets. It's what we always wished we had the technology to build when designing the original SDKs. Modern React, full TypeScript, with methodologies adapted to Rally's quirky and convoluted platform:

  • Grid, sortable, paginated, with column chooser and Excel/CSV export
  • Combobox, searchable dropdowns with single and multi-select
  • CardBoard, drag-and-drop Kanban with swim lanes
  • IterationPicker / ReleasePicker, self-loading, auto-selects current
  • Rally data layer, typed WSAPI queries, CRUD, and Lookback API
  • One-command deploy, straight to a Custom View

All React. All typed. All built by people who've been fighting Rally's API since before it had one.

Why "AI," you ask? Look, if you don't say you're doing AI, no one listens. I personally just enjoyed some AI-brewed coffee while listening to two AI podcasters debate whether the world is flat.

A cute robot barista pouring coffee while two robot podcasters debate whether the earth is flat in the background

All jokes aside.

WidgetAI is designed from the ground up to work with Claude. Maybe you're a PO who just needs one app moved and nobody will spare you a few sprint points? WidgetAI has a built-in AI migration tool so you can punish your work computer and make it generate the widget for you.

A forked path in a sunlit forest, one path leads to a glowing toolbox with React code, the other to a warm workshop with lights on and a welcome mat

So if you're looking at that migration list, you've got two paths: we build your widgets for you, or you build them yourself with WidgetAI. Either way, you're not starting from zero.

Stay tuned next week for the full introduction to WidgetAI.

Talk to us about your migration, or ask us about WidgetAI.

Related Reading