Power Automate is a companion to Power Apps
Power Automate is a standalone component in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem but also a great Power Apps enabler. This is because Power Automate has actions and triggers for interfacing directly with Power Apps. The Power Automate connection allows you to easily use Power Automate functionality in your app. Power Automate helps you to pull data from many different table and action connectors, so it's a valuable companion for Power Apps.
Business logic
Power Apps is great in scenarios where you have a direct action you want to take after a user does an activity. An example might be sending an email after a user submits a new expense report. If you need to notify someone the expense report was submitted, then you can do that directly from Power Apps.
But what if instead of just notifying someone, you also want to start an approval process? This is a great example of where connecting to Power Automate makes your app stand out. You can have Power Apps trigger a Power Automate flow when the user submits the data. Power Automate can then look up who the user's manager is, and send the manager an approval request. Power Automate will then help get a response from the manager, update the data source with the status based on their response, and send the original submitter an update.
Approvals are just one example of how you can use Power Automates native abilities to augment your app's capabilities.
Data connections
Power Apps offers many options for connecting to data through built-in connectors, premium connectors, and custom connectors. However, sometimes you need more. Some data sources, like custom APIs, can provide data back in a difficult to use format. For example, complex JSON structures aren't always user-friendly in your app. This is where Power Automate can help. Power Automate has other actions and expressions natively built in that are better at handling these complex data structures. And more importantly, these actions and expressions can parse through the data and restructure it into an easier-to-use object. After the data is parsed, Power Automate can respond to Power Apps with just the friendly data.
Use Power Automate to interact with complex data sources, restructure the objects, and then return to Power Apps only the data that you need. Watch this video to get started with creating a Power Automate flow to connect to Power Apps.
The following video shows how to use Power Automate as a data source for your Power Apps app.
Connecting Power Apps and Power Automate can bring greater functionality to your apps.