MISSION CRITICAL: Is PowerApps ready?

[ericonline]

Hello,

Resuming the conversation that was originally posted 5 months ago which received great input from the community. Checking the pulse 5 months later. Has the sentiment changed?

• Do you believe PowerApps is sufficiently hardened at this point in its development to handle mission-critical applications for your organization?
• Why or why not?
• What are your specific concerns? (availability, bugs, IDE, security, features, other?)

Feel free to define "mission-critical" in your organizations own terms. Thanks for the input PowerApps community. You. All. Rock!

[Anonymous]

I'm certainly not a long term user of PowerApps.  Created my first app for our continuous improvement group for collecting ideas from our manufacturing and operations associates.  It's not at all complex - simply saves/edits data on a Sharepoint list. 

My first challenge was my lack of knowledge and skills but eventually (with the help of many in this forum - thank you) was able to make all functions work as we designed with bi-lingual text. It looks great and works well - and then out of nowhere it doesn't.  Unfortunately, the people I'm doing it for can tell my bugs apart from infrastructure issues so it just looks bad.   

I went to the support link posted above and see the most recent posted issue on PowerApps was 5/2.  Yesterday for no good reason, my app started acting funny - like it wasn't connect to SharePoint correctly.  This hours after my most recent clean/tested release.  I decided to wait it out rather than try to waste time troubleshooting and it's working fine now.  I don't like trying to explain this.

I love the idea but I'm going to call this a prototyping tool with expectation that we develop quickly using PowerApps and if the solution is popular - re-develop in something more stable.

I have enough problems with my skillsets or lack of time.  Don't have enough hair left to deal with infrastructure fragility.  

Not giving up, just being cautious.

[ericonline]

@Anonymous ,

This is incredibly valuable and very clear feedback. Thank you! Hearing from all the voices here on this topic is helpful. If you can share, I'm curious about the following: 

- How many users does your app have? 

  - 1-10? 10-50? 50-250? 250-1000? 1000+?

- How often do they use the apps?

  - Once a month, a week, a day?

  - Multiple times a day?

- Do you use on-prem or cloud data sources? 

  - On-prem?

  - Sharepoint?

  - Azure SQL or other?

Thanks again for your awesome input!

[BrianHFASPS]

---

@ericonline wrote:

@Anonymous ,

This is incredibly valuable and very clear feedback. Thank you! Hearing from all the voices here on this topic is helpful. If you can share, I'm curious about the following: 

- How many users does your app have? 

  - 1-10? 10-50? 50-250? 250-1000? 1000+?

- How often do they use the apps?

  - Once a month, a week, a day?

  - Multiple times a day?

- Do you use on-prem or cloud data sources? 

  - On-prem?

  - Sharepoint?

  - Azure SQL or other?

Thanks again for your awesome input!

---

I am pretty new to this as well. We are optimizing our dismissal management at my school with powerapps.

How many users does your app have? - 10 or so

How often do they use the apps? - Most users once a day some multiple times a day.

Do you use on-prem or cloud data sources? - Azure SQL

Our issue is we have a critical time from about 2:45 PM to 6:00 PM where if the app is unavailable it totally destroys our dismissal process we have built on top of PowerApps. 

[seadude]

So here we are, over a year-and-a-half from the original post.

What does the community think?

• Are PowerApps and PowerAutomate ready to support mission-critical applications?
• Should they?
• Would you place revenue or safety-supporting applications on the PowerPlatform?
• If so, why?
• If not, why?

If you could, copy and paste the following template in your post to "normalize" some of the responses:

How long have you been using the PowerPlatform? (Weeks/Months/Years as appropriate):

Do you believe the platform could support your org's mission-critical functions? (Y/N):

If so, why?:

If not, why?:

Are you going to keep developing PowerPlatform within your org? (Y/N):

If so, why?

If not, why?

Your responses are very valuable for those in Governance positions as well as the Microsoft Team.

Thanks!

[PaulD1]

How long have you been using the PowerPlatform? (Weeks/Months/Years as appropriate): 2 Years

Do you believe the platform could support your org's mission-critical functions? (Y/N): No

If so, why?:

If not, why?:

I have had production Apps (note, not republished) broken by updates on two occasions (change to how 'Explicit Column Selection' is implemented and changes to CDS core entities) and on a 3rd was unable to deploy for a week due to a bug with App Checker getting stuck in a loop and preventing any edits.

New bugs keep being introduced. This means that when re-publishing existing apps (because you need to add a feature or even just correct a typo) you must do a full retest of the App including all kinds of edge case scenarios (like If statements no longer evaluating correctly!) to be sure your App can continue to work as expected.

The mobile story is very spotty - finding that controls such as the Pen control and Camera control do not work reliably on quite a few Android devices (still investigating this - might be some duff devices, but a pattern seems to be forming).

Inability to have multiple developers work on a solution at the same time means it is not possible to share the work to be better able to hit a deadline.

It is very difficult to take on another developers work - it is very hard to write 'good code' (encapsulated so the same logic is not endlessly repeated) and very difficult to 'follow a thread' (e.g. no native Search function for looking inside formulas).

Given the way licensing has been changed (first making on-prem gateway premium, then after people moved to Azure, making that premium too; change from the cheap-ish P1 license to $10/month/user/app) faith and confidence in long term solution cost has been eroded.

Are you going to keep developing PowerPlatform within your org? (Y/N): Sort of

If so, why? Only to maintain commitments to existing projects/solutions

If not, why? I am currently advising our clients not to choose PowerApps unless the solution is very small scale, non-critical and for a small number of users (in which case they would be unlikely to engage us to create the App)

Edit to Add: some of my thoughts on the matter here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAhCSQ5Xe4E&t=1461s 

[PaulD1]

Sorry, another report of PowerApps not being ready for mission critical solutions.

It appears that certain combinations of the Android InTune app and the Android PowerApps Payer App do not 'play well' together.

As far as I understand it (and I am not well versed in these areas), an update to the Android InTune App introduced/modified encryption of images taken with the camera. In some version of the Android PowerApps player this results in the camera 'viewer' freezing. I believe that, as long as you are running the very latest versions of both Apps you should now be fine.

Issues like this are extremely time consuming to diagnose, especially with new versions of the Power Apps player being released at such a cadence and the total lack of up-to-date documentation - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/powerplatform/released-versions... has not been updated since March.

The time taken to diagnose issues and maintain apps is such that I suspect overall, developing Apps on a more stable platform would be cheaper in the long run despite Power Apps' advantages in getting Apps released quickly.

Interestingly, running the App through a web browser on the Android devices was fine, so I think this was not just an inTune issue, it was the combination of specific versions of InTune and PowerApps running together.