Problem - Back button in Power Apps studio
A couple of new features came out recently to Power Apps - custom pages and the new solution explorer experience. While these features are great, one of the biggest adverse effects has been the addition of a back button to the Power Apps studio. These are the two main changes in the behavior of the maker portal when you try to open the studio to create a new app or to edit an existing app:
- When you edit an existing app, it now opens in the same browser tab vs in a new tab. This is inconvenient because you lose the solution explorer window. And if you want to access it while working on an app, you will have to open it again in a separate tab.
- Once the studio opens, you now have a Back button exactly where the File button used to be. So inadvertently, you end up clicking on the Back button when e.g. you want to save your app.
This was brought up in a tweet recently which made me feel that this is indeed an issue and I should share the fix/workaround I have been using.
Fix
Before we look at a fix to this problem, let's take a look at how the studio behaves currently, when accessed through make.powerapps.com or web.powerapps.com.
To get rid of the back button, access the Power Apps studio through create.powerapps.com. Once you do that you are taken to the following screen:
To create a new app, click on the New button. And to edit an existing app, click on Open and select an app. Once you open an existing app, it looks like this:
As you can see, there is no back button!
Summary
To summarize, if you are annoyed with the Back button that has started to show up in the Power Apps studio, just access the maker portal using create.powerapps.com instead of make.powerapps.com. It not only gets rid of the back button but also supposedly makes the studio a bit more performant. This is because when you use make.powerapps.com, the Power Apps studio is embedded in the maker portal. So here you go - you can now enjoy your app making experience without the back button like the good old days!
Looks like environment change is not possible with create.powerapps.com…
Hi Armin, it’s not straightforward but you can. If you go to make.powerapps.com, you can get the environment id from the url. Then when u go to create.powerapps.com, simply replace the environment id in the url and hit enter. The studio will open in the correct environment. Let me know if this doesn’t work.