Announcing Experimental Preview of canvas built-in offline

We are pleased to announce the Experimental Preview of the canvas offline feature for mobile application on iOS, Android and Windows devices. With this experimental feature, you can easily enable your Dataverse-centric canvas Power Apps for offline scenarios with simple switches and a simple canvas control. There is no need to use Power Fx SaveData/LoadData functions or manage offline data with complex collection schemes. Just build your app with normal Power Fx formulas and the offline feature handles all the complexity for you.

Offline is critical in today’s world, but difficult.

Mobility is crucial in our modern world. It is natural to access your data anytime and anywhere. You don’t want to have to think about it! But, to create an offline app for canvas today is hard. Makers have to implement complex logic within the app, download data (many tables with a large variety of sizes) on the device, synchronize and merge the data when you make changes on your device, decide whether the app should work against the local content or the server, and track network availability – which can be challenging in spotty connectivity areas.

With this new canvas offline feature, the built-in offline engine does all of the hard work for you!

Canvas offline apps are easy. Here’s why.

Offline with Power Apps Canvas is easy. First, enable your tables for offline. Then, enable the App for offline and you’re on your way. Here is what happens in the background: an offline enabled Power App first downloads all of the data it needs from the server. A customizable offline profile defines what data is downloaded to the device. Once your data is downloaded, your offline enabled canvas app works in an offline first approach – the app reads and writes data to a local store on the device whether or not the network is available. It doesn’t have to be connected to work. Then, your changes and changes on the server are regularly synchronized for you automatically in the background when the network is available.

Limitations and Availability

• Dataverse Files and Images are not yet supported for this feature. We know how important it is for users and we are doing our best to enable it as soon as possible.
• Non-Dataverse connectors like Sharepoint are not supported in offline.

Power Apps developers can turn on the canvas offline feature in the Power Apps Studio by navigating to list of experimental features in settings dialog of the canvas app (Settings > Upcoming Features > Experimental) and toggling “Dataverse offline”.

The feature will roll out country by country from May 15th, 2023 to May 30th, 2023 in https://make.powerapps.com. It requires the latest version of the Power Apps mobile applications in the iOS, Android and Windows stores. Check out the prerequisites for more details.

We are looking forward to your feedback

Your feedback will help us make this new app even better. Share your feedback on our Power Apps forum.

You can also reach us by filling out this form and we’ll get back to you right away. We are particularly interested to understand how you are using offline in your apps.

For more details, see the documentation.