What are PowerApps?

Power Apps are a term that's becoming increasingly more popular in the software development landscape. Are they just another form of applications or is there something special about them? Let's find out.

What are Power Apps?

Microsoft describes Power Apps as 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.

If we leave the fancy jargon aside, the definition makes it immediately clear that the goal of Power apps is to enable 'rapid' development of business applications.

How Business Apps were Developed Traditionally?

Traditionally, developing a business application followed the typical software development approach. This included steps such as requirement gathering, feasibility analysis, choosing the right platform, system design, implementation, testing, and deployment.

Businesses have, time and again, tried to simplify and shorten this process in order to reach the market faster. The shift from the waterfall model of development to an agile development methodology was the result of such efforts.

The quest to shorten development cycles was also pursued in the programming paradigm. This gave birth to programming techniques and frameworks that essentially simplified the amount of work a developer needed to do to build a feature.

Despite all these developments, building a business applications still takes anywhere between a couple of months to a whole year. In today's competitive landscape, this often means that the competitor swoops in and wows your target customer before you're software release has even been shipped out.

How do Power Apps Help?

So how do Power Apps help? Remember how software libraries focused on minimizing the code needed to build a feature? Some examples included application bootstrapping features like Spring boot that allowed you to set up the foundations for an enterprise-grade application in a matter of minutes. But they offered little features when it came to developing the application features in themselves. Power Apps sought to change this.

With Power Apps, you can not only generate code for the foundations of an application but also implement the core features of an application with little to no code. Power Apps enables this with a visual editor known as the Power Apps studio where you can simply drag and drop elements to create the user interface of your application.

Further, the business logic within the application can also be created using the visual interface. In cases where an extensive degree of customization is required, Power Apps supports the programming language PowerFx for developers to implement custom features.

What Changes with Power Apps?

Since Power Apps provides a vast amount of ready-made user interfaces and features, developers can significantly speed track the development of business applications. They no longer need to manually code every button and every checkbox. They can simply drag and drop to create user interfaces and even specify the logic behind them.

This significantly reduces the development cycle. Further it also eliminates manual mistakes and inefficiencies thus reducing the amount of time and effort required further.

Most business applications can be built effortlessly with the inbuilt components that Power Apps provide. Even if an application requires custom coding, it makes sense to build the majority features with Power Apps and use Power Fx minimally. This ensures that the code follows best-in-class standards.

The Bottomline

Power Apps is the result of inevitable quest for efficiency that takes place in every industry. By utilizing this platform, businesses can chunk out applications in a matter of days instead of the usual months.

Further, the platform is backed firmly by the technology giant Microsoft. Thus investing in this technology brings little risk and great benefits.

Seek out power apps development services from an experienced IT services provider to understand how they can benefit your business. Cloudesign has a proven track record of devleoping enterpise grade applications with the Power Apps platform. You can grab a free power apps consultation on our website.