Mobile offline for canvas apps

If users of your Dataverse-based canvas app have spotty or no Internet access, you can easily provide offline-first access with simple switches and a canvas control. Basic offline-first apps are easy to make. Just build your app with normal Power Fx formulas, and Power Apps offline features handle everything else.

Important

The offline-first feature works for standalone, canvas apps only. It doesn't work for embedded canvas apps or custom pages.

Important

• The offline-first feature works with Dataverse tables only and doesn't support the following Power Fx functions:
  • Min/Max/Avg
  • Relate
  • Unrelate
  • In (Membership)
  • UpdateIf
  • RemoveIf
• Filter on column lookup only supports one level of lookup when the app is enabled for offline.
• Many-to-many relationships are not supported.

Microsoft plans to support these functions and tokens in the future.

You can also build complex offline apps using custom offline profiles. An offline profile is a set of filters and restrictions on the data your app loads to users' mobile devices. Offline profiles help you to optimize your app's performance by reducing the amount of data downloaded to the device. For example, while you may have access rights to millions of records in a table, your app may need only a thousand of them. If you download only a thousand records, your app performs better. If you need more than 15 tables in your offline app, you may want to consider using a custom offline profile.

To get started with mobile offline, turn on the offline feature in your app and in the tables your app uses. A basic offline screen template is automatically inserted into the app for you to use directly or as a starting point. Set up mobile offline for canvas apps.

Mobile offline-first

Offline-first means that all the data users need when they're offline is copied to their mobile device. It requires network access to download the data initially, but after that, users work exclusively with the data stored locally on their device, even when they're online. Moving on and off the network doesn't affect the performance of the app because it's using local data. Power Apps monitors your app's network access. When it detects a connection, it automatically syncs any local changes to the server and downloads any updates from the server. The offline features handle conflict detection and minimize the use of system resources.

When you turn on the offline capability in your app, the app always runs offline-first, with or without an Internet connection. This functionality optimizes offline performance and creates a consistent experience for users as they change locations.

Why use offline for canvas apps instead of LoadData/SaveData?

There are some key benefits of using the built-in offline functionality for canvas apps instead of LoadData/SaveData Power Fx functions.

Topic	LoadData/SaveData	Built-in offline
Power Apps Studio support	Custom	Built-in
Code complexity	Power Fx code complexity scales up with data complexity	No code
Supported Power Fx functions	All	Partial (See limitations in the Important note near the beginning of this article.)
App checker rules	None	Flag common configuration problems
Offline or connectivity user experience	Not provided/custom only	Automatic
Sync user experience or status	Not provided/custom only	Automatic
Image and file support	Yes, but may run into performance and memory limits	Not supported
Optimized delta sync	No	Yes
Conflict resolution	Manual	Automatic
Local data store	Files	Transactional database
Automatically handles schema changes	No	Yes
Fast app launch with large datasets	No	Yes
Data size limit	Device dependent, 30-70 MB in most cases	Device dependent, up to the storage capacity of the device

See also

Working with canvas apps offline