Power Apps canvas apps are easy enough for citizen devs to build without a traditional developer’s background. And they can build some pretty complex solutions. Unfortunately, as apps grow in complexity, devs rarely remember to clean up their solutions and remove unnecessary elements, especially as solutions are promoted from one environment to another.
Likely the easiest things to clean up, remove screen controls that are no longer unnecessary. Hiding them is fine but deleting them is better.
The same applies to old app screens. Some devs prefer to simply remove these from the navigation, but if the screen or screens aren’t needed, delete them altogether. This helps to keep the app as lean as possible and reduces the total number of app controls. Too many controls could impact app performance:
For some of the not so obvious clean up opportunities, Microsoft offers the App checker (stethoscope icon). Often enough, this provides really good suggestions as to what should be fixed, like controls slowing down performance, formulas not being optimized, data sources being unused, etc.:
Per the App Checker warnings, consider removing unused data sources. Removing these data sources doesn’t break anything, but keeping them needlessly bloats the app:
One last easy clean up opportunity, remove the unused media files. As with the unused data sources, the app isn’t negatively impacted when these files are deleted. Keeping them only makes the app bigger than it actually needs to be:
Conclusion:
Canvas apps are low-code, but they’re still code. Ideally, all code should be as lean and trim as possible, thus removing unnecessary project assets to improve app performance.
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