How to Debug Canvas Apps

Debugging a canvas app is one of the most challenging aspects of being an app maker. We spend hours upon hours PERFECTING our app and end users have the AUDACITY to break it. Jokes aside, debugging is a critical pillar in the adoption and success of an app.

As an app maker, we can spend as much time as we want testing, but at the end of the day (especially for highly complex apps) it’s impossible to account for every possible use-case or variable that exists. You’re going to have bugs, and it’s up to us to fix them.

This can be really challenging – especially if we can’t reproduce the error within the Power App Studio. Previously, the only way to get a trace of events was to start a monitor log session while editing an app. Thanks to some new updates, you can now create monitoring sessions for a published app – better yet, you can invite an end user to a monitoring session and see what’s causing their error in real time. Just make sure you launch the monitor session from powerapps.com (the same place you click to edit an app), you won’t be able to invite a user if you create it from the editor.

As of now, this is only supported when the app is played in a browser. End users will have to play the app in a browser (still can be on a mobile device) for this to work. I will say I was able to get this to work natively in the Power Apps app using an iPhone, but not an Android. Feel free to give it a shot, but as of now we’ll have to make sure end users open our monitor session links into a browser vs the PowerApps app.

Hope this helps! Please take a look at the video for some more details on how this works!

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