Coauthoring lets up to 10 makers edit one canvas app at the same time, with live presence in the tree view. It reached general availability in October 2024. While more than one maker is in the app, you lose undo, redo, search, save as and cut, and the app language is locked to whoever opened it first. Checked by Balu at Kove (kove.nz). To check what your makers are licensed for, use the Power Platform licence picker, or book a free 30-minute call if you are deciding how to run a team of makers.
Coauthoring and copresence are two different things
Copresence is the older behaviour and it is still what you get in a canvas app until someone turns coauthoring on for it. In model-driven apps it is also what you get in regions where coauthoring has not rolled out. The first person to open the app in Power Apps Studio gets editing control. Everyone else lands in read-only mode, where they can look but cannot add screens, edit control properties or use the command bar. There is an Override button so a second maker can take control, and a notification prompting you to refresh when someone saves.
Coauthoring is the newer behaviour. Everyone edits at once, avatars appear in the command bar, and the tree view highlights the part of the app each person is working on with their initials. You see changes as they happen, the way you would in Word.
You turn it on per app, not per tenant. In Power Apps Studio go to Settings > Updates > New, search for coauthor, and flip the Coauthoring toggle. Turning it on overrides copresence for that app.
If you are inactive for two hours while editing under copresence, Power Apps asks whether you want to keep editing. Ignore the prompt and it puts you in read-only mode so someone else can take over.
The list of things coauthoring turns off
This is the part that catches people. While more than one maker is editing, Power Apps disables a set of features outright:
- Search
- Save as
- Opening another app, or a new one
- Undo and redo
- Switching authoring versions
- Cut
Source: Microsoft Learn, Understand coauthoring and copresence in canvas apps, checked 11 October 2026. Microsoft changes these restrictions, so check the page before you plan around them.
On top of that, coauthoring is switched off inside the Monitor tool, and Microsoft lists six more actions that can misbehave: renaming a control, adding AI Builder components, adding geospatial controls, running a flow another coauthor just added without refreshing first, seeing one author's errors appear on everyone else's screen, and copy and paste.
The app language is locked to the locale of whoever opened the app for editing first. Open the same app in a different locale and you can get formula errors that look like nothing you wrote.
Power Apps caps coauthoring at 10 makers per canvas app, counted across sessions or open browser tabs, whichever limit you hit first. Anyone past ten drops back to copresence, where they can view the app and see nothing update live.
Losing undo is the one that will bite you
Undo is the safety net for a bad formula edit. You paste something into an OnSelect, the screen breaks, you hit Ctrl+Z and carry on. With two makers in the app there is one shared history and no sensible way to unwind half of it, so Microsoft removed the feature rather than guess.
There is also no lock on a control. Microsoft's own documentation says it plainly: multiple makers can select and edit the same control at the same time, so be careful not to overwrite each other. Two people editing one gallery's Items property will produce one winner and no warning.
The practical answer is to agree who owns which screen before you start, and to keep anything formula-heavy to a single maker. Source control gives you the rollback story that undo used to, which is one more reason to have a real dev environment and a solution before you have a second maker.
Model-driven coauthoring is a separate feature
The modern app designer for model-driven apps has its own coauthoring, with its own rules. Several makers can add and remove components such as tables, dashboards and custom pages, add and remove views, forms and charts on those tables, restructure the navigation into areas, groups and subareas, and change app and navigation properties, all while watching each other move around the left nav in real time. A sparkle marks a page someone else just added, and stays until you open it.
Three limits are worth knowing. There is no autosave, so somebody has to press Save, and any maker with access can save on everyone's behalf. Unsaved changes are dropped after eight hours. Changes made in the older designers, such as the view designer and the form designer, do not sync live into the app designer.
Model-driven coauthoring is also rolled out by region, and is not available in Germany, China or Government Cloud regions. Those environments get copresence instead.
How I would use it on a small team
Split by screen and say so out loud. Two makers on one canvas app works when one owns the list screen and the other owns the form, and it goes wrong the moment both are in the same gallery.
Use it for the thing it is best at, which is review and handover. Sitting in the app together while someone talks through a change beats a screen share, because the other person can point at the control rather than describe it. That was the original pitch for the feature and it holds up.
Keep the formula work solo. Losing undo matters more the more logic you are writing, and a canvas app with real logic in it deserves a version you can roll back to rather than a second pair of hands. Past a certain point that argument stops meaning "add a maker" and starts meaning "leave the formula language": a code app gets you real source control instead.
Common questions
How many people can coauthor one canvas app?
Ten, counted across sessions or open browser tabs, whichever limit you reach first. Makers past ten fall back to copresence, where they can view the app but cannot edit it or see live updates.
Does coauthoring remove undo in Power Apps?
Yes. While more than one maker is editing, undo and redo are unavailable, along with search, save as, cut, opening another app, and switching authoring versions.
Getting a second maker onto your app
Most small teams reach for coauthoring at the point where one person has become the bottleneck on an app the whole business depends on. That is usually a handover problem rather than a tooling one. If that sounds like your setup, book a free 30-minute call and I will tell you which of the two it is.