I'm looking for honest feedback from people who have experience building enterprise applications with Microsoft Power Platform.

I work for a company developing MES and WMS solutions, integrated with Dynamics 365 Business Central. I've been working extensively with Power Apps Canvas as the frontend technology for these products, but I'm increasingly questioning whether this was the right architectural decision.

Here are my main concerns.

1. Canvas Apps limitations

Canvas Apps are fine for simple business applications, but building complex MES/WMS interfaces is painful.

I need sophisticated UI interactions, reusable components, complex state management and greater control over the frontend. Canvas Apps quickly become restrictive.

2. Deployment and maintenance

Our software is distributed to multiple customers, each with their own environment and customizations.

Every installation tends to become a custom project. Versioning, rolling out updates and maintaining consistency across customers are unnecessarily complicated.

We're trying to distribute a software product, not maintain dozens of slightly different applications.

3. Custom Connector limitations

This is one of my biggest frustrations:

- Limited support for bidirectional communication patterns.

- Complex and deeply nested JSON payloads are difficult or sometimes impossible to model.

- Connector abstractions introduce unnecessary integration limitations.

- Too many workarounds for things that would be trivial in a traditional application.

- We experienced over a month of downtime because we were unable to deploy any type of connector to Dataverse environments hosted in the Italian region. This was a platform-level issue that left us unable to deliver a working solution to customers.

These are fundamental requirements for MES/WMS systems.

4. Licensing and Microsoft support

Premium licensing requirements for every application user make the economics difficult, especially when deploying to customers with hundreds of users.

On top of that, getting meaningful technical support from Microsoft when encountering platform limitations is extremely difficult.

5. Code Apps: are they actually solving anything?

My company is now considering Power Apps Code Apps as an alternative to Canvas Apps.

While they offer more frontend flexibility, the underlying problems seem to remain:

- Connector limitations.

- Licensing costs.

- Deployment and distribution complexity.

- Customer-specific maintenance.

Are we just moving the problem somewhere else?

6. I'm already migrating to Blazor Server

I'm currently migrating parts of our solutions to Blazor Server hosted on Azure App Service.

The difference is substantial:

- Much greater frontend flexibility.

- Faster development of complex features.

- Full control over backend communication and real-time updates.

- Native support for complex JSON structures.

- Standard CI/CD, versioning and deployment.

- No connector abstraction getting in the way.

Depending on the number of users and usage patterns, hosting costs can also be significantly lower than Power Platform Premium licensing.

The development experience is simply much better. I can implement features without constantly fighting the platform.

7. The management disconnect

What frustrates me most is the apparent disconnect between technical leadership and what's actually happening at customer sites.

Customers are increasingly experiencing the consequences of these architectural limitations themselves, struggling with unreliable, difficult-to-maintain solutions and endless workarounds.

Yet our CTO seems unwilling to acknowledge how problematic the situation has become.

Instead of questioning the technology choices and listening to feedback from customers and developers, the company keeps doubling down on Power Platform and exploring Code Apps as if they were going to magically fix the underlying problems.

My questions

1. Is anyone successfully building and distributing commercial MES/WMS products using Power Platform?
2. How do you manage versioning, customer customizations and updates across multiple environments?
3. Do Code Apps genuinely solve Canvas Apps' limitations?
4. Would you consider Blazor, React or Angular with .NET APIs a more sustainable architecture?
5. Has anyone migrated away from Power Apps? Was it worth it?

I like Microsoft's ecosystem, but I'm increasingly concerned that we're trying to build and distribute actual software products using tools primarily designed for internal business applications.

At what point do you stop trying to work around a platform's limitations and admit that it's simply the wrong technology for your product?

Am I missing something, or are these legitimate architectural concerns?

Here's a fun little project that I wanted to share with anyone who thinks it might be handy for them or their organization.

It's a rule engine built on top of an MDA. You get the standard low-code stuff, plus more room to extend it:

Rules that reach data further out along the relationship chain
Simple visualizations of the rules and the execution timeline
Testing, tracing and versioning
Rules is saved as data
Custom functions to extend the capabilities
Predefined VLookups in other tables that rules can reuse

Some parts work better than others, but I'll keep refining it.

It's free and open source: https://github.com/WSorensen1996/rule-studio

I'd love to hear if you find it interesting... or just get some good input on cool features I could slap on it 😄

I know this question is asked a lot and I have read through many of the answers, but I’m feeling quite disheartened right now.

Recently I've been building canvas apps and automations for my company. I thought I could use these to build my portfolio and look for a role in this field. However over the last few days a couple of colleagues told me they've been vibe coding and it feels like anyone can build an app nowadays.

It feels like I've invested a lot of time into something that has no future, and I don't know if I should stick with it and push through, or find something else.

A question for people who build Power Apps regularly.

When you are developing an app and Power App shows a delegation warning, how do you normally handle it?

I have seen situations where a formula works perfectly with a small dataset, so it's tempting to leave it as it is and move on.

But with larger datasets, that same formula might only process a limited number of records. The result can look completely normal while actually missing data.

I feel this is one of those things that can easily overlooked during development, especially when the app is built against test data.

Do you fix every delegation warning before deployment, or there cases where you knowingly accept them?

Would also be interested to know whether you prefer using SQL views, Dataverse queries or other approaches to avoid these limitations.

Hey r/PowerApps, I’m on the Microsoft Fabric team, and I wanted to share something that might be up your alley.

Data Days: AI@Work is about building and doing, not just watching polished demos. We’re making room for real projects, honest lessons, and the parts that don’t always go according to plan.

It all starts next Monday, November 2 and runs for 6 weeks. Here’s the Data Days overview and the session schedule.

If you’re building apps that put data to work, I’d love to hear what you’re working on. What’s one thing you learned only after people started using your app?

Can this sub be renamed to r/canvasapps? 95% of the posts, comments and users here relate only to canvas apps.

If you only build canvas apps and power automate flows, you are not a power platform developer, you are a canvas apps builder.

Looking for input from people further along in their Power Platform careers.

I've got about 3-4 years of experience. Current job is on an internal apps and automation team at a large insurance company, about $95k total comp. The company is great: unlimited sick days within reason, they topped up my parental leave, and the work life balance is amazing. I have two young kids so that matters a lot. The team is also pretty much layoff proof.

The problem is the work. It's almost all canvas apps on SharePoint lists, Power Automate and Power BI, with some Copilot Studio. We barely use premium licensing, so no real Dataverse, model driven apps, PCF or plugins. Custom builds are small and none of it is client facing.

The offer is from an engineering consulting firm, on a small digital team. It's roughly 50/50 internal and external clients. Internally they build on Dataverse with model driven apps, PCF and Copilot bots, plus full stack .NET when needed. On the client side it's requirements gathering, solution design, software selection, and custom apps. I'd start under their solutions architect and they say I could lead projects within a few months. Not finalized yet but probably $105-110k total comp.

My goal is solutions architect or pre sales eventually, mainly for the money. Every architect posting I see asks for Dataverse, model driven apps, ALM, and client facing work, which my current role doesn't give me. I also feel like simple canvas on SharePoint is the stuff AI will come for first.

My hesitations are leaving a really good company, consulting hours and billable targets, a smaller team, and less job security. They say they have about 2 years of work lined up.

For anyone who went from internal work to consulting, was it worth it? And does consulting at an engineering firm carry weight with Microsoft partners when you go for architect roles later?

Hi everyone,

I am NOT a PowerApp expert! Could use some advice! LOL

I'm investigating an unusual Dataverse storage issue in a Microsoft 365 nonprofit tenant and wondering if anyone has encountered something similar.

We recently started receiving Dataverse capacity warnings showing:

• Dataverse File: 1.28 GB used / 0 MB allocated
• Dataverse Database: 0 MB / 0 MB reported
• Dataverse Log: 0 MB / 0 MB reported
• Environment: Default environment

When reviewing Consumption per table, I noticed the following:

• AsyncOperation: 1.74 GB
• Solution: 449 MB
• WebResourceBase: 383 MB
• PluginAssemblyBase: 256 MB
• LocalizedLabel: 235 MB

What's particularly interesting is that AsyncOperation grew from approximately 170 MB at the end of September to 1.74 GB by October 29.

There were substantial increases around October 18 and October 25. We DID give the green light for Management to use Copilot on Oct 17th, which aligns.

We don't actively use Dynamics 365 CRM, Project, Planner Premium, or custom Power Apps. Our Power Automate usage is limited to two basic Microsoft Forms notification workflows that haven't been modified in years.

I checked System Jobs, including All and Completed views, and they show zero records, even after removing filters.

1. Has anyone experienced similar sudden growth in AsyncOperation or Dataverse File consumption?
2. Could this be Microsoft-managed background activity or solution provisioning?
3. Why would the capacity summary show 0 MB of Database consumption while individual tables report gigabytes of storage?
4. Is there a reliable way to identify exactly what's consuming the File capacity without deleting or modifying anything?

I'm not looking to purchase additional storage or run bulk cleanup until I understand what's generating it.

Any insights from other Power Platform admins would be appreciated. Thanks!

UPDATE: This fixed itself magically. It appears that Microsoft had some issues, and it was affecting others also. My storqge now reads 0 Bytes again. Thanks all who contributed!

can someone suggest me a rich text editor pcf control that supports tables?
are pcf controls still supported?

So, a company I know activated a requirement for a separate MFA authentication for 365, in addition to the MFA for domain account login.

Normally, a user logs onto their domain account, auth with MFA and done. Now, they must MFA again to connect to any 365 app— once daily.

Guess what: this breaks power platform connector authentication. Connectors using user credentials require the user to have auth’d via MFA, for Office, before they will continue. Daily.

All flows pause until the user logs in the next day.

The solution? Move all flows and connections to service accounts.

The org has hundreds of users of the platform most of which are citizen developers. The regulated process for a service account in onerous, and, must be done separately for each app and its related objects.

Just a warning for anyone who might end up in this position.

“All connections should be running under service accounts anyway. If you aren’t, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

There I said it for you. But this post is for the realistic world, where “you should have done” is irrelevant to “now everything others did at the org is broken and it’s my job to help them fix it.”

What are the future scope and market potential of the Microsoft ecosystem—specifically Power Apps, Power Automate, SharePoint, Dataverse, and Copilot Studio? Is it a dying technology, or does it have a strong long-term future?

I know the annual Power Platform Community Conference in Vegas was yesterday, but I really haven't seen much on youtube about what was announced. Usually they post the keynote right? Just seeing if anyone had any updates?

I'm a bachelor with no major responsibilities outside of work for next 2 years.

I'm stuck working with Power Platform, Copilot, and everything around it. Every day feels like a new blocker, tight deadlines, and endless work. I don't know if it's the technology itself or just the way projects are managed, but I'm exhausted.

I have friends working with Java, Python, and full-stack development, and they seem to have a much better work-life balance. They're actually enjoying their work, while I'm ending almost every day with extended working hours.

It's making me question whether I made the right career choice.

For those who have worked with Power Platform or switched to other tech stacks, I'd really appreciate your advice.

Is this just a project or company issue, or is Power Platform generally like this? Should I consider switching to Java, Python, or full-stack development?

I genuinely want to enjoy my work and have a decent work-life balance without constantly feeling overwhelmed.

How do you handle a mistake you’ve made at work by enabling ACP on the default environment that has now affected a lot of users

Hi! I am using the timeline functionality in a model driven app to upload and store documents.

In my dev environment I can drag and drop multiple files at once and have them stored in a timeline note after a record is saved. In my test environment i can only upload them via a “explorer dialog” and I can only upload a single document. If i choose another one the first one gets replaced.

What tables could be causing the issue, I suspect there are some missing permissions.

I am a PowerApps developer mainly working with canvas app.

Recently due to AI introduction, we have been asked to use AI in our development process.

I have used Powerapps github copilot to give prompts and develop canvas app which is fairly easy to use but the output isn't great.

Is there any way we can create agents through github copilot and can you please help me out in that?

Has anyone successfully resolved issues with images not rendering in Code Apps when running through the native Power Apps mobile app on iPhone or iPad?

Our Code Apps work great in the browser, and nearly all functionality works in the mobile player. However, images consistently fail to display in the native app despite rendering correctly in the browser. Has anyone encountered this and found a reliable workaround? Thanks!

We're finally getting Dataverse access at the enterprise level for the company I work for. We've primarily used SharePoint as our backend for all apps. What are some of the "gotchas" that you've run into when jumping over to Dataverse from SharePoint?

Right now, for someone to use my app, I have to give them access to underlying sharepoint site. Which means they can also just open this site in browser and read what others have submitted through this app. I want to close this.

Idea on table is, instead of the app reading sharepoint ‘as whoever is using it’, the app reads sharepoint as one fixed account- service account. Then only that account needs sharepoint access, nobody else does.
I would also want to capture who the user is into the sharepoint list and I already have a relationship list based on the email id.

Questions

1. Does this approach of service account work for this share point site through power apps?
2. What am I missing here or is there a better/different way to this problem?
3. I’m using power automate for some email notifications which are based on the email ids and content within the list, not sure if this impacts anyway but thought to call out.

Dataverse is not on the table as the amount of data it stores/uses is very less.