Building apps in this environment gives non-coders a platform to deliver real value for clients without the overhead and protracted time frames that go along with legacy development. While these no-code tools will not replace legacy app building (at least not soon) Power Apps is to app development what Object-oriented languages were to early Basic and C++ 30 years ago.

By Martin Heller – Power Apps is a suite of apps, services, connectors, and a data platform — including tools for non-coders — designed for the rapid development of custom business apps that connect to data stored in Power Apps’s underlying data platform (Microsoft Dataverse) or in other data sources (on-prem or in the cloud) such as SharePoint, Excel, Office 365, Dynamics 365, and SQL Server. Once you’ve built an app, you can share it with your colleagues.

In other words, Power Apps is a low-code, web-based, and cloud-based platform for building web and mobile web applications, one which easily connects to business data. Programmers can extend Power Apps to “programmatically interact with data and metadata, apply business logic, create custom connectors, and integrate with external data.”

Unlike the version of “PowerApps” (notice the historical lack of a space between words) that I previewed in 2016, the current Power Apps does not require using a Windows Store-based design environment, and it’s much more than a no-code builder. This is the cloud-based “PowerApps” design environment that Microsoft was promising back then.

Power Apps competes directly with Amazon Honeycode and Google Cloud AppSheet, as well as with about 400 other low-code and no-code app builders.

Typically you start building Power Apps from the Power Apps Home page, then develop them further from the Power Apps Studio page. You should be able to view apps on your Windows, iOS, and Android devices using the Microsoft Power Apps Mobile app, which you can download from the appropriate app store. If you have administrative rights, you can manage your organization’s environments, data connections, roles, and policies from the administration center page. Read On: