Republish your apps to get performance improvements and additional features

With the PowerApps platform, you can build great apps and deploy them to your end users, but sometimes you make an app and don’t update it for many months. When you open the app in the studio, it reflects all the performance improvements that the PowerApps team made in the past since the last time you opened the app in the studio. You can also enable any preview feature into your app to see whether you want to try it out.

 

How much performance improvement should you expect?

This depends on how recently you published your app. For example, only 40% of the apps that are embedded in SharePoint lists would run in under 1 second, after publishing 80% of those same apps run in under 1 second!

 

Why is this important?

We keep adding features and updating the formulas to make the experience better for you and your end users. When you publish ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/canvas-apps/save-publish-app ) an app, the version of the app is locked into the version of PowerApps Studio in which you created the app. The app won’t get updated with bug fixes and performance improvements until you republish it or PowerApps automatically republishes it.

 

Version control

Many app makers overlook the version-control feature:

• When you save an app, you create a version that can run in PowerApps Studio, but your end users can’t run it.
• When you publish an app, you create a live version that your end users can run.

If you make a change that breaks your app, you can quickly revert to any previous version by doing the following:

1. Go to https://web.powerapps.com
2. Select Apps, go to the details of your app
3. Select the Versions tab
4. Find the last version that you want to restore and select the Restore icon

 

Do I have to republish my apps?

It can be cumbersome to remember to open and republish each app regularly, however when you republish your app new features ( https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/category/new-features/ ) are available for you to use and performance enhancements will auto apply. When you do not republish your app, the app is locked into its current version and will not change until it is republished. Your app will continue to work in its current state, but will not be as performant as it could be.

We are working on a feature that will republish your app for you. For mission-critical apps, you might want to opt out of this feature and manually republish those apps, and we will also support that scenario.

 

Try it out

Start today by opening PowerApps Studio, republishing an app that hasn’t been published in a while, and then testing it to see how it works with newer builds.

We’ll keep you updated as the automatic-republish feature becomes available. We would like your feedback on this feature and how it might help you.