Opening: The One Mistake That Dooms Most Power AppsEveryone loves a shortcut—especially when it’s already baked into your Microsoft 365 license. You’ve got a business problem, a SharePoint list full of data, and Power Apps sitting there teasing you with that beautiful button: Create an app. Click it, and thirty seconds later, voilà—an interactive app appears. It displays data, edits data, even deletes it. You feel like a developer god. You’ve automated something. You’ve joined the Power Platform revolution.Except… you haven’t. What you’ve built is a demo that works until it doesn’t. Because for most people, the very moment SharePoint feels like the easy way to store app data is also the moment they’ve doomed their app’s future. And yes, that’s on you. You thought “it’s already there, it’s free, what could go wrong?” The answer? Everything—slowly, silently, then all at once.The problem is structural. SharePoint was built for collaboration—documents, wikis, lists. Power Apps was built for applications—structured relational data, transactional workflows, record-level logic. And when you force a collaboration tool into a database’s shoes, it pinches. Delegation fails. Permissions tangle. Performance collapses. Your users stop trusting the data, and your IT team starts losing sleep.By the end of this explanation, you’ll know exactly when SharePoint Lists are safe, and exactly when you’re holding a ticking time bomb disguised as a table. Because scaling a toy app into a business system on a list-based foundation? That’s how Power Apps break in production. Let’s peel back that seductive simplicity and see what’s really happening underneath.Section 1: Why Everyone Starts Wrong (SharePoint’s Seductive Simplicity)Here’s how it begins: you open SharePoint, create a list, and notice that Power Apps lives right there in the ribbon—literally begging for attention. There’s no license prompt, no “setup a database” warning, just that friendly “Create an app” link. It’s the Microsoft equivalent of pushing a big red button labeled “Instant Hero.” So you click it. Five seconds later, you’ve got something live—data connected, galleries showing records, forms editing values. A business miracle. You think, “Fantastic, I don’t need IT!”Oh, you sweet summer child.SharePoint is woven into Microsoft 365 so tightly that it gives an illusion of competence. Because every productivity hero knows how to create a list—columns, views, permissions—it feels like a database. But technically, a SharePoint list is a glorified Excel sheet taped to a content library. It was designed for document metadata and small-team tracking, not enterprise-grade data transactions. It’s brilliant for tracking meeting notes. It’s disastrous for tracking orders, customers, or assets across departments.And because Power Apps can automatically generate forms from a SharePoint list, you instantly assume it’s optimized for this purpose. You create, read, update, delete—it all works. Until you add more users. Or more data. Or heaven forbid, more complexity. Suddenly, delegation warnings appear—tiny yellow triangles quietly judging you from the formula bar. You ignore them, naturally. After all, the app still works. It shows twenty records just fine. No one notices the missing thousand.That’s the invisible trap. SharePoint lures you with convenience and then punishes you for success. As your list grows—five thousand items, ten thousand, one hundred thousand—SharePoint’s friendly demeanor turns fickle. Views time out. Queries throttle. Filters return partial data. You start blaming Power Apps when the real problem is architectural: you stored app data in something that was never meant to scale.And yet, this pattern repeats across organizations daily. Why? Because SharePoint comes pre-installed with credibility. It’s familiar, accessible, and above all, free. Dataverse, by contrast, sounds expensive and complicated—even though it’s the system designed for this exact purpose. So...