Power Apps - development vs production

“It works fine in development.”

Probably one of the most dangerous sentences in application development. 😄

I've seen Power Apps behave perfectly when we test with a small amount of data.

Then the application goes to UAT or production and suddenly users start reporting:

“It's taking too long to load.”

“The gallery is empty.”

“The search isn't returning everything.”

“Why is this screen so slow?”

Many times, the formula itself isn't the only issue.

The data is.

For example, an app might work perfectly with a few hundred SharePoint records. But as the list grows, the same approach can become a problem because of delegation and the amount of data being processed.

That's why I've started asking these questions before finalizing an app:

Is this query delegable?

How much data will this list have after one year?

Are we loading records into collections unnecessarily?

Are we doing multiple LookUps inside a gallery?

Can the filtering happen closer to the data source?

Would Dataverse be a better option for this requirement?

These questions don't always come up when we're building the first version of the application.

But they become very important later.

One thing I'm learning with Power Platform is that a solution that works today is not necessarily a solution that will scale tomorrow.

Sometimes spending a little more time on the data and architecture in the beginning saves a lot of time later.

Curious to know what others have experienced:

What was the biggest Power Apps performance issue you faced after moving an application to production?