Model-driven app

A model-driven app is one of two Power Apps application types (the other being canvas). Model-driven apps are generated from a Dataverse schema rather than hand-built screen by screen — the maker configures which tables, forms, views, charts, dashboards, and business process flows are included in the app, and the platform renders a responsive, security-aware user interface automatically from that configuration. Every Dynamics 365 CRM-side application — Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Project Operations — is a model-driven Power App under the hood, built the same way a customer could build their own. Model-driven apps suit data-centric line-of-business scenarios with rich Dataverse schemas, related records, and complex security requirements.

In practice, the "generated" part is what makes model-driven apps cheap to extend. Add a column to a table, and it can appear on the form and in views without writing any UI code; add a relationship, and related-record navigation and sub-grids follow the same pattern. Security trims automatically — a user only sees the records, fields, and commands their security role permits, without the maker writing a single access check. Advanced find, global search, dashboards, and auditing all come from the platform, not from custom development. The trade-off against a canvas app is layout flexibility: a model-driven form follows Dataverse's standard form layout conventions, and pixel-perfect customisation (a specific colour, an unusual control arrangement) is harder or impossible without a custom page or embedded canvas component.

Where confusion shows up: people sometimes assume "model-driven" means "less capable" because it isn't drag-and-drop, when the opposite is usually true for genuinely data-centric apps — a model-driven app inherits years of platform investment in security, search, and auditing that a canvas app has to either forgo or rebuild by hand. The right read is scope, not capability: canvas apps fit a focused, bespoke-UX task; model-driven apps fit anything that's fundamentally about managing structured, related, security-scoped business data at scale, which is exactly why the entire Dynamics 365 CRM suite is built that way.