What needs improvement with Microsoft Power Apps?

In the future, I would like to see a more intuitive merged experience for pro-coders. For instance, being able to quickly work in Azure within a preferred IDE, like how developers typically structure their code in TypeScript or other conventional programming languages. It would be great if Power Platform had a nice integration between the low-code environment, where developers can drag and drop, and the pro-coding side. This way, both pro coders and low-code developers could work together without any friction, and both types of users would have an experience that meets their expectations. I would like to see improvements in the Power Apps experience—specifically, the experience for makers developing Power Apps. So far, Microsoft has made good progress. They have a nice feedback cycle, and they listen, adapt, and improve. So, a greater focus on the overall experience would be nice, so that all types of makers feel welcomed and don’t get frustrated when building.

There is always room for improvement in stability.

Because we have a lot of data and users, achieving an appropriate level of security and privacy is sometimes difficult, especially for sensitive data. I do not mean that the system is lacking in this area; rather, we need very competent people. I believe we don't have enough people to appropriately secure our data and control the transfer of this data.

We're running a campaign to encourage users to utilize the Power Apps. This is particularly challenging as we incur licensing costs, and some individuals do not use the applications.

You need to be familiar with Microsoft Power Apps' infrastructure. If you understand Power Apps, it becomes easy to use; otherwise, it may seem challenging. SharePoint can be a complex product, but if you have someone guiding you or showing you how to use the apps with online checkpoints, then it becomes much easier. To utilize Microsoft Power Apps effectively, it's essential to grasp its integration with SharePoint. I recommend considering a structured course instead of relying solely on YouTube videos, which can be time-consuming. Whether managing a Spanish restaurant, an Indian restaurant, or any other business, investing in formal training is crucial for efficiently getting your business up and running. This approach saves valuable time compared to piecing together information from scattered online sources like YouTube or random articles across the Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft Power Apps allows companies to efficiently manage and utilize measurement or scattered data in competitive environments. While existing solutions are available, understanding how to leverage these solutions effectively is crucial. Power Apps provides an intuitive interface to seamlessly implement measurement data from an open environment such as a bakery or similar establishments.

There have been many improvements. First, performance could be improved. Second, there should be more flexibility in implementing features and functionality. It would be beneficial to have two modes: a developer mode, where developers can utilize more components they build themselves, and a mode for handling large amounts of data. Custom error management is also a challenge. Customization, including the ability to integrate custom code, would be valuable. Due to performance issues, managing large amounts of data can be challenging. Exception handling poses significant challenges. Creating custom connectors and dealing with paid connectors can be expensive.

I recommend improving Microsoft Power Apps' licensing model. I've encountered challenges related to licensing complexity, which has led some customers to opt for traditional solution development and deployment methods instead.

The product is expensive. It costs around 20 euros per month.

Sometimes, the opportunity includes two products, and the outcome for each product is different. It would be beneficial to have a feature that allows users to split the opportunity into separate logs for each product.

The solution must provide more integration with third-party applications.

The fact that we couldn't share that with our other organization or outside of the organization, consisting of our colleagues in the joint ventures, was a weakness of the solution. So, it is an area that needs improvement.

Though I don't remember enough details about the solution to comment on it, I think the solution does need to add some technical features to it since I remember that we had faced some gaps while trying to automate certain processes. One area where the solution lacks is the limited size of the database it offers its users. So, some businesses planning to scale up may face certain restrictions while using the solution. Microsoft Power Apps also needs to provide its users with certain specific connectors within the solution. I won't be aggressive enough to complain more about the solution since, in our company, we have a lot of specific handmade tools, and so we don't explicitly expect Microsoft to create specific connectors for Power Apps.

The scalability of the solution could improve.

My problem with solutions like Power Apps and Betty Block blocks and probably with every no-code platform out there is that, as soon as you want to do something custom, something that's not provided by the environment you're using, it gets really tough. You have to work around the constraints of the platform. No-code platforms have constraints. I'm a developer myself, so I tend to not use no-code. I tend to code a lot. The notion people have is that no code equals no knowledge, and that's simply not true. Even though you don't have to write codes, you still have to know what you're doing. I had some trouble interfacing with the Dataverse database. If I could, I'd make the couplings with other software easier. The integration with other software could be better. Any developer who had to work with an application made in Power Apps would find that useful. There are limited use cases.

We would like to see the period for viewing executions within this solution to be extended beyond its current limit of 28 days. We would prefer to be able to offer our customers an infinite amount of history to search.

We would like to see some improvement in the cost of the solution when an organization has a more complex network structure. The advanced connectors are very expensive, which discourages our customers from implementing it. We would also like to see a more robust library of uses for different system roles to be built into this solution, such as for authorizations.

We use GoCanvas to make forms. It's easier to make forms in GoCanvas, but Power Apps is cheaper because it is bundled with our Office 365 license. if I want to create a form in Power Apps, I need some knowledge, but GoCanvas is intuitive.

The area where this product can be improved is the documentation. When we get stuck it's with the documentation when we are not able to find the codes we need. The solution requires a lot of codes and understanding of the scripting language. Most of the time I end up going to forums to get them. I would like to see Microsoft come up with a knowledge base for Power Apps. In the next release, I would like to see more integrations because there are some that are not available and we end up having to get adjacent script to work on to work with that.

There is room for improvement in error handling and debugging. I would appreciate it if Microsoft created something like the social network graphs Facebook sometimes shows you (potential connections). It would be great for Microsoft to take a similar point of view regarding the data and data flow in Power Apps. It would help us see which field is changing and which is influencing the follow-up field or display or workflow, etc. As a chief financial officer, I would like to see the mark of chain retracement and where the money flows. Imagine dropping a little drop of ink onto a handkerchief and seeing the ink sucked into the fibers of the handkerchief and distributing itself. Similar things happen to money if you put it into a small market and a chief financial officer needs to have that information.

I would like to see some of the connectors which they have right now to be more basic. The ones they have right now, they claim, are premium connectors. They should make that a little more affordable and have it in the free version. Some of the basic databases like SQL should be part of their normal connectors, and it should necessarily be premium. It can be a bit more difficult to set up the first time. They have a feature that integrates well with Power BI, however, it is not seamless. We'd like a better, more seamless integration with Power BI in the future. They need more of a font selection. If I'm in Excel and I'm using a particular font, I'm limited in terms of which I can use. It should allow for use of any fonts under Microsoft 365.

The product has a few issues. The portal and canvas apps are the main things that need to be improved. Bringing the UI of a model-driven app to something closer to what Salesforce has will definitely be a game changer.

In terms of workflow automation, I believe that capabilities for creating the entire business process are required, or, at the very least, the option to model the business process, define complex business events, handle them, and route them to appropriate business stakeholders. Those, I believe, are the critical areas that require improvement. For the time being, it is only an application development platform. I am not counting a business processing management platform, only working on capabilities with business process management.

I don’t have much hands-on experience with PowerApps. I’d need more time with it. As of now, I can’t think of an area for improvement.

In my experience, the solution's deployment can be tricky. In my experience, it was not good as it was giving errors around the tables and I couldn't find what was happening. I had to break it down into different solutions - one solution containing all the tables and the second solution containing the application, plus the power domain that I had for this particular application. It's something that's not good, in terms of the way that things work. When I added Power Automate into the solution, for some reason it disappeared from my Power Automate page, as it was added inside the solution. It was very, very weird. It may be a bug. There's a primary interface and integration feature and we build some HL processes there. However, suddenly after adding this part, and automating the solution to deploy it, it was just not available for me anymore and I had to go inside the solution and open the MS files from there instead of the usual place where all the Power Automates are created. It was like a bug and also. In terms of the issues that I have with the solution feature inside PowerApps, I didn't like it. I've seen this too complicated. It's something that Microsoft has to improve. The speed and performance could be better. PowerApps sometimes gets stuck, gets slow and I don't have any reason for why it's happening. Suddenly you are trying to see the rows on your screen and you just have a wait to get the results back, then there's nothing happening. These things look like an environmental issue, however, I don't know if it's something about the localization or something else. We'd like our option in terms of licensing that can be paid by the app and not by users. That could be something good. Just the way that they charge the license, it's too much. There are not many options. They could give a little bit more flexibility to choose in terms of options for a license.

If the price was reduced and the quality of the user interfaces was improved it would be beneficial.

I don't have any notes for improvement. It does what it says it does. We'd like to see more integration capabilities in the future.

Microsoft PowerApps could improve the speed of Power Automate, it is not very fast. In a feature release, any additional features would be beneficial.

We had issues with the syntax during the build. Writing quotes could be simplified. Customization, in general, is somewhat complicated.

I'm looking forward to further improvements of what you can do with mixed reality capabilities. I would like to see more improvement, for example, in direct collaboration. There is something currently, however, it's still on a preview mode. I'd like to see more. What I'd also like to see is to be able to use, for example, another tool for sketching mock-ups or the design of the applications and being able to transport the sketches directly into, let's say, a PowerApps container so I can design the app somewhere else, and then I can transport everything in PowerApps designer, and I can get started with inserting logic in the mock-ups that I have already designed somewhere else. This is something that I'd really like to see in PowerApps. The experience could be a bit better improved and be consistent throughout all parts that form components. For example, the same experience we have in PowerApps is something that should also be in other PowerApps platform products. In general, the environments in the workspaces are a bit faster than in the cloud.

The stability of this solution could be better. It's getting better, the performance. However, it's not there yet. We'd like to be able to leverage more reuse of the code we are implementing in the apps.

The solution could improve by having more connectors for different solutions in a way to create custom connectors. Additionally, they should make HTTP Connectors free again because it was not always a premium feature. These HTTP connectors allow you to send API requests which can be important.

Most of my training for what I do has been by watching or learning in the community. There needs to be better training on either one of these.

PowerApps can't do a lot of things that users need now. For example, it can't handle signatures.

I would like it if PowerApps stored the code differently. For example, it would be nice if it were held in our GitHub repo or some other place, and we could version it to evolve it more easily. Another thing I'd like to see is more collaborative features so that more than one person could develop several things in PowerApps at once. For example, you could have creative technologies doing stuff for the visual design while the developers are doing the different things that they have to do to make the application run. Microsoft could streamline monitoring and management. In addition, it should be easier to put the solution in different environments. For example, you should be able to move from a dev environment to a production environment seamlessly.

When we talk of integrating with external applications, that's one area where, even today, I had to loop in my code developers. If this area can be streamlined so that my techno-functional consultants, who are on-site, can immediately start working on something without the assistance of developers, that would be ideal.

The solution should have more integration with other platforms. The licensing price could be better.

They need a bit of RPA functionalities. There are other competitive products such as ServiceNow and Automation Anywhere. They offer exhaustive functionalities. Power Apps as a platform maybe need some ready-made templates that could be deployed. That would help. There are occasional performance challenges. The product could do some integrations with third-party providers. That can be still expanded. They do have a decent number of integrations and connectors available, however many of those connectors only offer the basic functionalities. I'd like to see better, wider connectivity.

The initial setup should be improved. It could be easier. Technical support could be faster, and more accurate.

By working on PowerApps, you will still be required to do some low level coding. However its a great tool for existing Microsoft Developers who can now churn out Apps and enable a seamless integration across the entire suite of Microsoft Cloud applications.

In an upcoming release, I would like to see custom APIs, better integration with other solutions, and more connectors available.

The price could be lower.

Improvements to the capturing of geographic locations and integration with maps would raise my score of the product from seven point five to its maximum of ten.

I can't recall any missing features. Currently, the solution is doing a good job of meeting my needs. My target is to have an application that I can use for clients. I don't see Power Apps as being the long-term solution. They get expensive when you start to go to non-internal users. If there were to be external users, the solution would get expensive. The documentation isn't great. It's only 75% of what you need to know. If you go beyond that and run into issues, it's really not going to help you. For example, the software is almost guilty of being too powerful. The particular problem I had was that they recommended that I use Azure to do the login, to do the user authentication. Therefore, I set it up. However, it didn't work. I could not find the solution via documentation or online at all. Without knowing I could access technical support, I paid someone a couple of hundred dollars to try and figure it out for me and they couldn't figure it out. Eventually, I was just looking around and I came across one setting hidden away and it was set to false. I instinctively realized that it looked like it might be related and so I set it to true and all of a sudden everything worked. However, that whole issue could have been mitigated if the documentation just took that extra step and got into the nuances of the product. What I'd love to see them do is to sit down and clean up the interfaces. There are three different ways that you can program. I'm particular to using a Power Apps portal. There are three different ways I can edit my Power Apps portal website. Each of them kind of does a better job of doing some things than the other ones do. Therefore you're kind of in this in-between realm of having to choose between certain things if you decide to go with a specific approach. They really need to clean up the development environment so that t's straightforward and predictable across the different ways to program. It does things, such as, if you want to delete a particular field or table, you get this message that says you can't due to the fact that it has dependencies. It's really hard to find what those dependencies are. Items like that need to be clarified. The application is working great now, however, every once in a while it gets complicated and it's hard to navigate.

There is always room for improvement and with PowerApps, there is a long way to go. The flexibility and the user interface need improvement. The speed, as in how fast things can be done, needs to be improved. The workflow needs improvement and should be included in the platform.

I think installation and integration could be improved. It's tricky compared to other tools.

The availability of templates needs to be improved. I understand that the ecosystem around it is still developing, but we need more templates. I would like the entire ecosystem around it to improve. I would recommend adding AI components. Even though we can always connect to Azure for AI components, they should slowly start looking at adding some AI components to PowerApps so that out-of-the-box learning can be applied to process flows. Salesforce has the Einstein layer that works along with license platforms. PowerApps should also have something similar.

The solution is pretty difficult to understand. You need to educate yourself on the product in order to be able to effectively use it. The solution needs a bit more refinement in general. It's still a new product. There's a lot of improvements that can be made from a useability perspective. There needs to be better guides and documentation available for new users in order to help them properly understand the product and how to use it.

Microsoft should combine both the web and the mobile environment with all of the layers of development into one package. Currently, it's separated because Microsoft Power Apps does not cover all of these issues, so you have to connect to two different solutions. With Mendix for example, with one environment, the developers can create either a mobile app or a web app — it's an all-in-one environment. Microsoft Power Apps is not a service. For instance, if you want to connect to a database, it will be done via a database platform.

The pricing structure needs to be improved, the current information is confusing.

You can't add too many filters onto anything you build, otherwise, it will be very slow and it will affect your performance. For example, some companies want to use a lot of dashboards for Excel Spreadsheets or Sharepoint. If you put everything onto a mobile app, you won't get the kind of performance that you would if you just worked in Sharepoint. A mobile app has certain limitations.

Its user interface can be better. It is good, but it can be a bit clunky.

The user interface is pretty good, although it is a little bit clunky and can be improved.

The solution does work a bit differently on cell phones and tablets. We still have information on our SQL server and we need to migrate things over. The timing of doing that is going to be a little tight. We're not in production yet, so we're still working through some issues. However, by the time we are in production, I'm confident this solution will be ready.

When you capture a lot of data, the data becomes enormous. It's one of Microsoft's challenges that there is a threshold limit of 5000 items. It has to improve the threshold limit where it can handle data beyond 5000 items. I would like to see integration with on-premise business applications, complex business routes, and complex business workflows.

The connectors are the main components that reference the data sources, and these need to be improved. They have to both improve the ones that are already there and add new ones.

It would be good if this solution supports standard BPM notation. We are thinking of switching to a BPM solution next year because it is not a BPM solution.

I can't think of any features that are lacking. The pricing could always be less. I have heard from developers that there is documentation missing in the reporting. It would be useful if Power Apps were capable of providing more flexible reporting to allow the developer to really to manipulate the data, and get into more details - for example, why it's being changed and how it's been changed. If there was a way they could comment right in the reports, that would be very helpful. There should be more document management capabilities.

It is not enough user friendly. It also doesn't integrate very well with SQL Server.

For me, it's easier if I have visual references in order to learn the system. However, I'm also Spanish, and the tool is in English. That's one level of difficulty. Another level is that there aren't too many Spanish use cases and examples. It would help if there was more documentation in my native language to help me learn the system more effectively. In English, I don't think this is necessarily a problem. There seems to be a lot of English documentation. It would be helpful if there was more explanations built right into the solution's interface so that I can understand what action is supposed to get what result. In terms of usability, when I tried to make an amortization table, I couldn't find an exponential option. I don't know if it's ideal for financial tools that deal with credit or loans. I'm still looking into this. It's sometimes hard to import groups of options. At this point, I need to enter those manually and it slows the process down.

PowerApps is still a bit new compared to a slightly more mature product such as OutSystems. OutSystems has many features that are still not available in Power Apps. Simple things like navigation are better with Outsystem without much coding. The key is the licensing; the fees could be reduced, especially at the enterprise level. I would like to have more usability, with more fanciful navigation. More like what you would find in Outsystems BI. They offer more drag and drop navigation, and more advanced navigational options around the drag and drop lists and hierarchical navigation out of the box is literally a drag and a drop. It can be done in Power Apps, but you need to do a bit of coding to achieve the same thing. It's lacking in features.

Microsoft PowerApps is not intended for customizing what's generated in a major way. You have these little windows where you can enter your script and such, but there is no script debugging, nothing like that. You build and you auto-generate the code. From there, if you want to customize it too much, then it's going to get difficult — OutSystems was more intended for that; you can do a lot more customization after you build your solution.

The solution is limited in a very specific way. One of the major problems with it is what PowerApps calls the delegation warning. Regardless of what platform, data source, et cetera, that you're using, you can't retrieve more than 2000 records. I connect to an Oracle server that has well over 150,000 records that business users want to see or could use at any given time. The only thing that I could surface in the app is a portion of up to 2000 records at one data call. Due to this limitation, I have to build in options for the user to refine the search, to go back out to the server, and then pull back records that match that search as opposed to offering all 150,000+ records. You need to filter quite extensively. Microsoft refers to is as a "delegation issue".

1. The licensing lakes a plan for a mass number of external users on the app. 2. The Data layer based on Azure data layer which complicates the environment, the min. required knowledge (citizen developers will not be independent under with PowerApps) and the vendor lock-in limitation. 3. The training is not integrated in the tool and the available training is not a full course which might be available in the online universities but not free and accessible like in other tools.

If they would reduce the price, that would be an improvement, and they should also improve their customer service support, because the last time I contacted them it took one week to resolve the issue. That's not right. I would like to see improvement in terms of implementation. Sometimes the application is a little slow. If I want to load the data from Power Apps, it generally takes time to take the data from experiential Power Apps, but in this case it takes longer compared to other technologies. I've written to them about this.

Integration with databases and other tools needs to be improved.

If you are accustomed to Microsoft technology, then it's quite easy to learn, but if you are new around the whole online platform of Microsoft, then it takes time. Even if you are familiar with Microsoft products then there is still a learning curve on the use. Previously with Microsoft, they were offering hands-on exercises or labs. I think that should be put back in place. Also, a few years ago Microsoft had an MVA program. It was called Microsoft Virtual Academy, where you could learn a lot about technology, but now it's deprecated and that's why it takes time to learn the new platform. I have always felt that you need an IT background to use this solution. I would like to see more regarding the help element of the program itself. More courses around the usage and of the technology features, more training, and guides.

The solution is evolving very fast and every month new features are introduced. Sometimes it's difficult to catch up with all the evolution that's happening. I had to focus on Power BI for a while and left PowerApps at the side for a couple of months and when I came back, it had changed its interface and moved components around. Some connectors are not very easy to use and sometimes they lack proper documentation. There should be better connectivity with other applications. I tried connecting with IBM and it brings errors at each refresh. The PostgreSQL connector is useless as it doesn't work. There's a lot of research needed and you often need to download extra drivers or equivalent components that end up not working well.

The product could be improved by making it a production application and enabling the export of apps. If you want to set up a site for home rentals, for example, just a basic outline as a starting point, this can be done. The issue is that it cannot be exported. It can be applied in-house, for demonstration purposes for your employees, for example, but you can't really make use of it otherwise. It's a problem. On the whole, it's a very workable solution because it's an automated way of making applications. You have a template, you have the application know-how, etc. If it could be exported into different languages and could enable different ways of outputting the information, that would be great. For now, it's limited and that's a bit of an issue. Enabling all the applications on internet-based devices to transfer data in and out would make it an excellent product.

The editor in the Web browser could be improved because it can be difficult to implement the commands in the buttons. In the next release, I would like to see Microsoft PowerApps be more integrated with Microsoft Teams or SharePoint and with different applications. When I configure PowerApps in Sharepoint it appears that it is not integrated with the page. When it is configured it looks like it is a different application.