What is Power Apps?

Power Apps is a suite of apps, services, and connectors, as well as a data platform, that provides a rapid development environment to build custom apps for your business needs. Using Power Apps, you can quickly build custom business apps that connect to your data stored either in the underlying data platform (Microsoft Dataverse) or in various online and on-premises data sources (such as SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, and so on).

Apps built using Power Apps provide rich business logic and workflow capabilities to transform your manual business operations into digital, automated processes. What's more, apps built using Power Apps have a responsive design and can run seamlessly in browser and on mobile devices (phone or tablet). Power Apps "democratizes" the business-app-building experience by enabling users to create feature-rich, custom business apps without writing code.

Power Apps also provides an extensible platform that lets pro developers programmatically interact with data and metadata, apply business logic, create custom connectors, and integrate with external data.

Power Apps for app makers/creators

Using Power Apps, you can create three types of apps: canvas, model-driven, and portal. More information: Overview of creating apps in Power Apps

To create an app, you start with make.powerapps.com.

• Power Apps Studio is the app designer used for building canvas apps. The app designer makes creating apps feel more like building a slide deck in Microsoft PowerPoint. More information: Generate an app from data
• App designer for model-driven apps lets you define the sitemap and add components to build a model-driven app. More information: Design model-driven apps using app designer

Ready to convert your ideas into an app? Start here: Planning a Power Apps project

Power Apps for app users

You can run apps that you created, or that someone else created and shared with you, in browser or on mobile devices (phone or tablet). More information:

• Find and run apps
• Run apps on Power Apps mobile

Power Apps for admins

Power Apps administrators can use the Power Platform admin center (admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com) to create and manage environments, view Dataverse analytics, and get real-time, self-help recommendations and support for Power Apps and Power Automate. More information: Administer Power Platform

Power Apps for developers

Developers are app makers who can write code to extend business app creation and customization. Developers can use code to create data and metadata, apply server-side logic using Azure functions, plug-ins, and workflow extensions, apply client-side logic using JavaScript, integrate with external data using virtual entities and webhooks, build custom connectors, and embed apps into your website experiences to create integrated solutions. More information:

• Dataverse developer
• Model-driven apps developer
• Canvas apps developer

Power Apps and Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 apps (such as Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and Dynamics 365 Marketing) also use the underlying Dataverse platform used by Power Apps to store and secure data. This enables you to build apps using Power Apps and Dataverse directly against your core business data already used within Dynamics 365, without the need for integration. More information: Dynamics 365 and Dataverse