This isn’t exactly a surprise anymore, but I’m glad it’s finally official. Retirement of App Builder agent and vibe.powerapps.com was announced on October 12 via the M365 admin center message MC1505609:

That rollout schedule doesn’t leave much slack for customers. The new thing is literally rolling out in preview this month and already next month the earlier tools will be dead. I think it’s fair at this point to ask whether A) anyone was actually using these vibe app generators, and B) if so, whether ripping them away so suddenly reflects how the MS business applications platform is managed these days.

Sure, the App Builder agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot was always behind the Frontier switch. It was available only to selected users in customer tenants where these preview features had been explicitly enabled. But Power Apps Vibe Apps was something quite different. It was on by default. And not just that: it was impossible to visit the Power Apps maker portal without seeing the “try now” prompt that was begging the users to experience a “smarter and faster experience that brings together generative design, AI agents, and plan-driven workflows”. Here’s a screenshot from the launch day of November 18, 2025:

It didn’t even matter that the feature only supported US environments — everybody across the world was invited to try this amazing new experience! After all, it was the headline feature of the Ignite 2025 announcements titled “Inside the new Power Apps: The future of app development”.

And now, as we’re approaching Ignite 2026, that future of app development will be gone for good from Power Apps. Instead, customers are told to forget about the Power Platform experience and the traditional Dataverse-based ALM. They are instead asked to “direct makers to use Copilot Cowork or Microsoft Copilot Studio for new app development.” Which is about creating Managed Apps to be run on the new Copilot Managed Runtime:

Of course, this is also a preview thing. As we can see from the rollout schedule in the Message Center message, apps in Copilot Cowork entered Frontier preview in September. Apps in Copilot Studio started rolling out in preview this month. And by the end of next month, you’d better have migrated from the old previews onto the new preview or you’ll lose access to the apps:

So, is this how it’s going to be then? The preview features announced on conference stages get replaced by the next preview features, one year later on a similar conference stage. The preview countdown clock resets and we start with a brand new bag of excitement about the future of [whatever]. In the age of AI, software doesn’t need to be GA. Frontier, baby!

I get it. Tech vendors need to have shiny new things to show to the audience on a regular basis. It’s nothing new and it is not wrong in itself. As long as the audience remembers it’s all aspirational talk about what could be — not what they are expected to go and do right away. Or as I like to frame it:

But I wonder: can the audience really tell the difference these days? I sure hope so, because I keep constantly running into things that a Microsoft blog post claims to be A, and then when I go and look at the actual software it’s B (like Autopilots). Or the whole thing is not there, and never materializes. With a silent update of the website scrubbing away the earlier announcement traces.

I bet not many people spend as much time analyzing the public materials from Microsoft related to Power Platform as I do. The signals have been out there, such as the end of Vibe Apps updates in April 2026 or the near-complete lack of news around App Builder since its launch promo. Meanwhile, at the M365 Community Conference in April, the “Power App Builder’s Guide To Choosing the Right Path” session still presented these as the go-to tools for end-users and builders. Which prompted me to do a vibe check post on LinkedIn to push back on this message:

The dilemma is always the same for Microsoft representatives: whatever exists out there must be promoted, until the next thing comes around, after which that will be promoted. Rinse & repeat.

Rarely are there situations where it’s possible to publicly acknowledge the gaps and talk about what’s really happening. Back when I was in the Microsoft MVP program between 2013-2024, the best part was when such honest discussion could take place under the NDA umbrella. Not often, not always, but there were definitely many occasions where authentic trust was established between parties thanks to this.

On the public web, achieving meaningful transparency is tough for any global corporation. In the MS BizApps space, the release waves and release plans were established to build this trust at a time when the evergreen cloud services were causing customer concerns about what was going on with their critical LoB systems. Back in 2018, the waves and plans did certainly improve the situation — even if they never became the ground truth for platform releases.

Today, in the age of Copilot, Microsoft has gone the other way. We have once again far less certainty on what the tooling behind business applications will look like six months from now. I believe this is largely because not even the teams at Microsoft can commit to such plans anymore, given the state of software in the age of AI coding agents, and also the problematic cultural direction of the organization.

We are being assured that the AI at Work roadmap tells customers and partners what’s coming. Well, take a wild guess whether that roadmap says anything about Copilot Managed Runtime, the new Managed Apps, or apps in Cowork / Copilot Studio? Of course it doesn’t.

Enough of the “I told you so”. Let’s look at the bigger picture and where the AI-generated apps are heading on Microsoft’s cloud platform. Because ultimately I do think that we’re better off with both App Builder and Vibe Apps being erased from the product portfolio, to make way for something that customers and partners can genuinely build on. Because the selection of different app types / experiences available in the Microsoft cloud doesn’t make much sense when presented as a list of options to choose from.

The story around Copilot as a platform is worth repeating. We are starting to see Microsoft communicate this in their own materials, too. Here’s the latest marketecture (“marketing architecture”) picture shared this week at a Copilot event: