Deploy Power App to a Managed Home Screen through MEM

As a lot of organizations are picking up Power Apps, I have seen more and more use for them. Some organizations are now developing Power Apps and having their end users consume those on mobile devices. As these apps are sometimes used in production environments, these apps often appear on Android Enterprise Kiosk devices.

Pinning a specific Power Apps to the home screen can be done really easy from within the ‘Power App’ app itself. But if you try that on a device with a Managed Home screen, this action will fail:

This is why we want to push this link directly. The only way to do this at the moment is to push the Power App as a web link through the Managed Google Play Store. To do this, we need to find the URL first.

Get the Power App URL

To find the URL, go to the PowerApps admin center and select the environment in which the Power Apps is created.
Select the resources tab, find ‘Apps’ and select your application.

This detail screen will show you the URL for the application. Copy it and save it for later.

Add the web link

The next step is to add the web link through the Managed Google Play Store. Get to the MEM admin center, go to ‘Apps’, ‘Android’ and select ‘Add’. For the app type, we want to use a ‘Managed Google Play App’.

This will open the Managed Google Play Store, in the left-hand navigation bar select ‘Web Apps’.

Select the ‘Plus icon’ on the bottom right to add a new web link.
Fill in the necessary information:

• Title: A custom title of your choosing. This will be the app name.
• URL: The URL of the app which you just copied
• Display: Choose the display type like you want, I prefer the ‘Full screen’ mode.
• Icon: Upload your own custom icon, you can download it from the PowerApps admin center if you want.

After you have created it the app, you will get the notification that it takes a while to finish creating the application. In my experience this takes about 5-10 minutes.

After you have waited, click sync to force a synchronization to Intune.

Now we can push the application to the device and enable the application in our managed home screen. You have easily identify a web link by the publisher. The publisher will always be your organization’s name.

End result

If you sync the device you will see that the shortcut is added to the managed home screen.

If you open the app, it will open inside Google Chrome and it will open Power Apps Online.

It looks visually different than manually pinning the application, but it works just fine and users don’t really see a difference.