Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hey there

This is an informational post - no need to reply. Just thought it might be interesting to some people creating responsive apps.

So, my initial idea was to update all of my apps to be responsive. Whether you'd use it on your mobile phone with the Power Apps app, in MS Teams, or simply in a full-width browser experience. They all should look consistent, no matter where you're using them.

I quickly realized it's not that simple. In fact, it very much depends on the way you've initially created the app and scale to fit. And even though I've used a centralized style source (meaning all apps accessing the same styles), my apps looked all different in different screen sizes. I quickly found out that it's because I've created some of them with the "Start with your data" (SharePoint) and others with the "Blank app".

Also, some of them are using the portrait, landscape, and even custom-screen orientations. Furthermore, ScaleToFit (STF) matters a lot depending on the app-type.

So I created some tests to see how it all behaves. In short:

Portrait/Landscape doesn't affect font size
Scale To Fit (STF) affects font size with Blank apps,
Scale To Fit (STF) does not affect font size with apps automatically built from data sources

Meaning, when creating your app it is already important to know the possible devices/screen sizes. If you want full flexibility, I'd recommend to go for blank apps directly and then build up everything from scratch. Personally, I never liked the Scale to Fit option with the Power App app. It always adds a little black border around your app - space you could otherwise use. That's why none of my apps are using it.

Here's the outcome of my tests (SP = built off a SharePoint list, STF = Scale to Fit, 24 = font size defined in PowerApps):