Exercise - Manage app versions in Power Apps

  • 5 minutes

Microsoft Power Apps can help if you save changes to an app that you shouldn't have or if something else goes wrong. For apps that you save in the cloud, Power Apps keeps a history of the changes that you make. You can view each version that you've saved and restore your app to a previous version if necessary.

Diagram of app versions.

Understand that restoring and publishing are two different things. Users will only see the published version of the app, regardless of which version you're editing. Restoring a version of the app merely gives you that version to edit.

View versions of your app

  1. From the Power Apps home page, select Apps from the left panel.

  2. In the list of apps, select the Commands ellipses (...) next to the app name and then select Details.

  3. Select the Versions tab.

This tab shows all versions of the app that you saved as you developed it. In your Versions list, you might see one of the versions with Live highlighted in grey in the Published column if the app has been published. In this case, the "live" version is the one that your users are currently using.

Screenshot of tab showing app versions.

If the app hasn't been published, then the version that you're currently able to edit is at the top of the list.

The highest numbered app version is always at the top of the list, and this is the one that you edit when you decide to edit the app. These versions aren't always the same.

Restore a previous version

  1. Select the More commands ellipses (...) next to the desired earlier version and then select Restore.

    Note

    If you have not yet published the app, you will have the option to Publish this version instead of Restore. Publishing or Restoring both have the same effect of enabling you to edit the restored version of the app.

  2. A popup dialog appears to let you know that this version will be saved as the next version of the app. For example, if you have five versions of the app and you decide to restore "Version 3", this dialog alerts you that it will add it to the version list as "Version 6".

  3. To restore the selected version as the current version of your app, select Restore.

Power Apps adds a new version to your list.

Remember, when you restore a version of an app, the newly restored version gets a new, incremented version number and appears at the top of the list. A new version never overwrites a previous version.

Then, the restored version needs to be published before users will see the new version. If for some reason you aren't able to restore a previous version, you can try the following:

  • Make sure the app isn't open in Power Apps Studio. If the app is open, you won't be able to restore a version.

  • Check to see that the version you want to restore isn't older than six months. Power Apps can only restore app versions that are less than six months old.

Note

Updates to an app are usually welcome improvements, but they can also negatively affect users if you remove or significantly change features. Remember to create a notification plan for alerting your users of major updates.

Next, we'll learn about sharing your app!