Was Power Apps designed to support medium to large scale projects?

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Posted on by JC-04041807-0

Hey folks,

I'm new here so please be gentle.

I'm researching Power Apps. In my limited findings so far, I've noticed some design choices that seem somewhat limiting in terms of medium to large team/project collaboration. While PP claims to be designed for small or "large" projects, I have some questions:

Does the platform enable multiple engineers to collaborate with version control, change history, and conflict resolution?
Background: Based on this article (Collaborate on canvas apps in Microsoft Power Apps Studio - Power Apps | Microsoft Learn), it seems that you have two options. Option 1 is to only allow one engineer to edit the app at a time (aka. "copresence"). That is the default. Option 2 is to enable multiple simultaneous editors with lots of caveats including that you might accidentally overwrite someone else's changes without even knowing it. Every VCS system since forever provides protections against this via conflict detection/resolution. Does PP?
Does Power Apps support some form of shared controls or libraries? Or, are we expected to copy and paste controls and code any time we want two apps to share functionality or look/feel?

I am aware that you have the ability to export an app to a YAML file and then use a traditional VCS to maintain that file. However, that would not be integrated with the platform so I'm wondering if there is an integrated solution or do we have to build our own external solution?

Thanks.

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Power Apps Pro Dev & ISV

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Michael E. Gernaey 53,433 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi @JC-04041807-0

The answer is yes, but like anything it depends on your scenario, but yes it was.

So some feedback. You stated

I'm researching Power Apps. In my limited findings so far, I've noticed some design choices that seem somewhat limiting in terms of medium to large team/project collaboration.

What research exactly told you that some design choices (what design choices, do you mean the platform or how you design things?). It's best not to just generalize with things that do not have anything to do with your question as it takes time and energy from those who, honestly just want to help :-) not read about people's thoughts on Microsoft decisions :-), esspecialy as you use the term Power Apps, which is an all encompassing set of features and platform items.

Didn't read the article and do not see a single example of what you want to build.

1. you have to give specific questions to specific needs

2. Again, your research, although making your generalized comments is far limited. Just searching you can see you can

* Create PCF Conrols

* Create Canvas App Controls

* Create Component Libraries for sharing

* Create app catalogs etc

My point is, before writing up essentially a retort of a platforms "supposed not well researched issues" think of writing it like this

Hi,

We are evaluating using Power Apps, (power automate, power pages, model and or canvas app) and we have some concerns based on our needs.

In our scenario, we are looking at doing ABC

Does that align with the platforms abilities, including things like governance, scale, code sharing, etc etc because no one, not even me with decades at Microsoft and helping design and build the platform itself, can tell you for sure will it meet your needs without actually giving clear details of your needs.

Thanks!

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lbendlin 8,479 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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And I read the question totally differently altogether, more from a usage pattern perspective. Micro Service versus batch transaction, OLTP and ACID and stuff.

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JC-04041807-0 19 on at

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Thank you for your feedback. Apologies if anything I asked was offensive in any way. It was not my intent to write a “retort”.

My intent was to get a general understanding of whether PA was intended for medium to large projects. If so, I would have a large list of expectations, but I’ll be more specific about a small subset of them here. I will also include example use cases to be clearer. I need to evaluate whether Power Apps would be a good fit for our upcoming solution. I’m afraid I cannot share details about our app purpose.

Questions:

Does Power Apps provide a built-in solution for source control and history? (I understand it does save previously deployed artifacts but I’m more concerned about source.)

As an engineer, I can easily browse and view details of changes made to the app including author, date, and details of the changes.

Does Power Apps provide a solution for change conflict detection and resolution when multiple engineers are contributing to the same app?

As a team of engineers, I can make a change to an app concurrently with a colleague and any conflicts in our changes will be made clear with a workflow to resolve said conflicts.

Does Power Apps provide a solution for creating and sharing UI components and common code across apps? (Forgive me but I couldn’t find any way to do it.)

As an engineer, I can create a UI control that is intended for use across multiple apps in our portfolio and share this control for use by other engineers and apps.

As an engineer, I can create code libraries that are intended for use across multiple apps in our portfolio and share these libraries with other engineers and apps.

Does Power Apps enable a workflow for code/change reviews by peers before committing them to your environment?

As an engineer, I can create a proposed change and get feedback on my change from colleagues before deploying the change.

Does Power Apps provide a mechanism to create and use “fake” user accounts for test automation that do not require a license fee?

As an engineer, I can create automated tests that use a user account that simulates the capabilities and authorization of my end user without paying for an additional license.

Does Power Apps allow a single user account to run the same app in multiple instances concurrently? (for test automation)

As an engineer, I can create a test that uses a test user account and run the test concurrently across multiple instances.

Does Power Apps Test Studio show test result run history?

As an engineer, I can see the pass/fail and detailed test result history for an application.

Is there a way to run a Power Apps Test Studio test without deploying the actual app to the environment? (For example, if I only want to update the test and not the app.)

As an engineer, I can update a test and try it without deploying the application itself. (with conflict detection/resolution and history this is less important)

Can a user who is not a creator or co-owner of an app run the app tests in Test Studio?

As a non-team member, I can run the tests for a given app.

Thank you.

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ronaldwalcott 3,847 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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For your use case based on your questions it would probably not be a good solution.

It can use Github for source control but the code aspect of it unlike something like ASP .NET still needs work. It doesn't operate the same way where you can have different programmers working on one aspect then merging changes.

UI components will require a different way of thinking.

Testing requires a different way of thinking including the creation and running of test cases,

Power Apps would require you to change how you think about app creation. Without knowing your solution if you want complete control over your data layer you will still have to create your API layer in whatever language you use.

The Power Platform would let you quickly build interfaces on that data layer in a functional manner. Say you want a customer portal. You could build one and implement it easier using Power Pages rather than using other tools. Don't know if it would be more cost effective but it would let you prototype and implement faster,

I find that the Platform is extremely suited for productivity driven solutions yet can still provide value to companies whose existing solutions are API driven.

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