autoAdd has never placed anything
autoAdd: true is supposed to put a plugin on a site when the app installs.
It has not placed anything, on any site we have tried.
Three fresh development sites. A Dev Center install and an app-installer install. Every slot present, every slot empty, every plugin correctly registered. The only plugins that have ever appeared on a site are the ones somebody pressed a button for.
This matters more than it sounds, because it changes what a shop has to be told. If placement happened on install, setup would be “install the app”. It does not, so setup is “install the app, then place four things by hand, then publish the site” — and every one of those steps fails silently when skipped. A shop that misses the publish sees the picker in the editor and not on the real checkout, and has no reason at all to connect the two.
So the dashboard grew a button per plugin, and the documentation leads with the fact that nothing arrives on its own.
We kept the autoAdd declarations. They cost nothing and would start working
the day Wix fixes whatever is wrong. But nothing is expected to arrive on
its own, and the distance between those two positions is a support queue.
There is a second-order cost worth naming. Every slot a plugin occupies is one more thing blocking an uninstall — Wix refuses while any plugin is placed. So the mechanism that would have made placement automatic is also the mechanism that would make the app impossible to remove. That trade is worth revisiting the day a removal API exists.