Power Platform Worst Case – Day 7: App Checker? Ignored Since 2022

Power Platform Worst Case – Day 7: App Checker? Ignored Since 2022

The Promise of the App Checker

When organisations adopt Microsoft Power Platform, one of the often-highlighted features is the ability to build apps quickly and safely. Among the built-in governance artefacts is the so-called App Checker (or sometimes Solution Checker) which is meant to evaluate apps/solutions for potential issues — such as performance bottlenecks, security gaps, unsupported constructs, and maintainability problems. The idea: before you deploy to production, run the checker, get a report, fix what matters. In theory this translates to higher-quality low-code applications, fewer runtime failures, fewer usability surprises, and ultimately lower risk. Especially for organisations scaling Power Platform usage, such a tool should act like a safety net. However: what if that safety net is not being used, or worse: is failing silently? That’s the worst-case scenario. And as of 2022 and beyond, there are signs that this net may have been neglected.

Evidence the Checker Is Being Ignored

One of the first signals is the number of bug reports and community posts showing failures or errors when running the App/ Solution Checker. For example, a GitHub issue from October 2022 shows that when upgrading to version 2 of the build-task, the “Solution Checker” started failing with a non-recoverable error:

“Sorry, the app encountered a non recoverable error and will need to terminate. … Exception Type: System.Net.Http.HttpRequestException” GitHub Another issue from September 2023 describes an “Unauthorized” error when running the checker via CLI in a CI/CD pipeline. GitHub Additionally, in the Power Platform Community forums, users report that they cannot locate fields the checker refers to, or the checker output is vague and leads to confusion rather than clear action. community.powerplatform.com These issues indicate that the tool is available but in many real-world organisations it is either failing, not trusted, or outright ignored.

Why Being Ignored Is a Big Problem

When you skip or ignore the App Checker, you incur risks:

• Quality risk: Apps built without automated validation may include inefficient formulas, over-delegated queries, unsupported patterns, or performance-blocking logic. Over time these degrade user experience and maintainability.
• Security & governance risk: Without the checker confirming no unsupported connectors, missing privileges, or misuse of Dataverse tables, you may expose data or open up governance blind spots.
• Operational risk: If the checker fails silently, teams may believe they have validated their app (tick box) when they haven’t. That creates a false sense of security.
• Scale risk: As Power Platform usage grows, more makers build more apps. Without automated checks, the chance of technical debt escalates rapidly, making it harder to maintain or refactor apps later. In short: ignoring the checker is like building a house without an inspection and hoping nothing collapses — eventually something will.

Root Causes: Why the Checker Gets Ignored

Understanding why this happens helps to address it. Some of the typical root causes:

• Tool reliability issues: As seen in the GitHub issues, the checker sometimes fails or returns ambiguous results (e.g., unauthorized, non-recoverable error). If teams repeatedly hit failures, they may just stop trusting it.
• Complexity & usability: The checker outputs may be technical and require the maker/developer to interpret the results and make changes. If the feedback loop is too heavy, makers skip it.
• Cultural / process neglect: If an organisation has not embedded the checker into CI/CD pipelines, governance gates, or mandatory deployment steps, individual teams may bypass it for speed.
• Lack of visibility & accountability: Without governance dashboards or metrics showing “percentage of apps passed through checker”, leadership may not demand usage.
• Lack of awareness / training: Makers may not know about the checker, or know how to act on its findings.
• Versioning & change drift: As new features, connectors or updates come in, the checker may lag in catching the newest issues; this may reduce perceived value.

What Organisations Should Do Today

If you’re reading this and realise your organisation may be in the “ignored checker” camp, here is a recommended approach:

1. Assess current usage: Determine how many solutions/apps in your environment have been run through the checker (or similar tool) in the last 12 months. Are there many that skipped it?
2. Audit recent checker failures: Review the reports or logs. If the checker tool is failing, document the failure types and address them (e.g., permission issues, service endpoints, CLI tokens).
3. Embed the checker into your pipeline: Make running the App/ Solution Checker a mandatory step in your Dev → Test → Prod pipeline. Reject deployments that fail critical issues.
4. Define and prioritise rules/thresholds: Not all findings are equally critical. Define what constitutes “blocker”, “warning”, “info” for your organisation (performance, security, maintainability).
5. Educate makers and developers: Provide training on reading checker output, fixing the common issues, and interpreting the results. Share examples of “bad vs good” results.
6. Monitor and report: Create dashboards or governance metrics: % of solutions/apps passing checker, % with critical findings, mean time to remediate. Use leadership visibility to drive compliance.
7. Review tool health and updates: Because tool reliability issues were evident, ensure your version of the checker, CLI, build tools are up-to-date; monitor vendor/ community forums for known issues (such as “Unauthorized” error in 2023).
8. Plan for technical debt: For apps that skipped the checker in the past, schedule a remediation audit. Run checker retroactively and prioritise fixes for high-risk apps.

What If You Continue to Ignore It? (Worst Case Scenario)

Here’s the scenario if the checker remains ignored:

• Over months to years you accumulate dozens or hundreds of apps with inconsistent patterns, some heavyweight queries, connectors creeping in without oversight, duplicated logic, poor delegation.
• A few apps start to fail under load: slow response times, user frustration, broken flows. Because they weren’t validated early, you need to refactor or rebuild — which is costly.
• Governance finds gaps: maybe an app uses a connector or a custom API that wasn’t granted proper permissions, or exposes data in ways the security team didn’t anticipate. Breach-risk goes up.
• When you finally try to clean up, you face backlog: “we have 150 apps, only 12 have been run through the checker in the last 2 years, and 34 apps have unresolved critical findings”. Fixing them requires resources you didn’t plan.
• Loss of trust: business teams begin to see low-code apps as unstable, governance teams see them as unmanaged sprawl, and executives see a technical debt ball in motion you can no longer ignore. Essentially: by ignoring the App Checker since 2022 you’ve let the risk compound. What may have been a handful of manageable issues becomes a mountain of technical debt and operational baggage.

Summary

The “App Checker” in the Power Platform ecosystem is not just another optional tool—it’s a key piece of maintaining healthy, scalable low-code/app-platform governance. If your organisation hasn’t engaged it, if you’ve seen failed runs, or if you’ve just skipped it altogether because “we ship fast”, then this is your red-flag moment. Day 7 in our “Worst Case” series is a wake-up call: ignoring the App Checker since 2022 isn’t just a small oversight—it’s a growing risk. Take stock now: audit your usage, fix the pipeline, and embed the checker into your process. Because every solution that skips the check is one more potential failure, one more unexpected cost, one more bit of technical debt. The sooner you engage, the better your long-term outcomes for scalability, maintainability and governance.

Source: Power Platform Worst Case – Day 7: App Checker? Ignored Since 2022