Here is a small confession from twenty years of building line-of-business apps: the ugliest screens I have ever shipped were not the complicated ones. They were the simple ones I built in a hurry, from a blank canvas, at the end of a sprint, when “just get the data on the page” quietly turned into a wall of default-blue buttons, mismatched spacing, and labels I sized by dragging until they looked about right. A blank screen feels like freedom. Mostly it is a bill you pay later, in inconsistency.
The July/August 2026 Power Platform update takes a run at that bill with a set of design-first, Fluent 2 screen templates for canvas apps — professionally composed starting screens built on modern controls, so the app you begin isn’t an empty room but a staged one. Microsoft’s announcement calls out three new landing templates rolling out now — a hub landing page, a feature landing page, and a list page — and they arrive alongside a refreshed family of modern screen templates you may already see when you add a screen. Either way the idea is the same: the layout is composed, the theming is coherent, and the accessibility is baked in before you place a single control of your own. You walk in, you rearrange the furniture, you put your own data on the shelves. You do not start by pouring the foundation.
Why “I’ll just style it myself” falls short
The obvious objection is that you can build any of these by hand, and that is true — you can also mix your own paint. The problem was never capability; it was consistency at speed. Hand-styled screens drift: this one has 16px of padding and that one has 12px, this button is your brand blue and that one is the default, and six months later a new maker adds a seventh screen in a seventh dialect. Templates built on modern controls don’t just save you the first hour — they hand every screen the same design vocabulary, and they inherit the ongoing quality and accessibility work Microsoft keeps pouring into those controls. Good defaults are not a luxury. They are the difference between an app that ages well and one that looks like it was built by a committee that never met.
Prerequisites
- A canvas app in Power Apps Studio (a brand-new app is ideal for trying the templates without disturbing anything real — that is exactly what I did here).
- Modern controls and themes enabled — the templates are made of modern controls, so this switch is not optional. It is the same one the Data Grid control needs, and if you turned it on for that, you’re already set.
Step 1 — Turn On Modern Controls
In Studio, open the … overflow menu, choose Settings, then go to Updates → New and switch on Modern controls and themes. This is an app-level setting, so it applies to the app you are in, not your whole tenant. Until it is on, the design-first templates and the modern controls they are built from simply aren’t in the room with you.
Step 2 — Open the New Screen Gallery
Select New screen on the toolbar and actually read the gallery instead of reflexively clicking Blank. With modern controls on, the options are composed, Fluent-themed starting points: a responsive Split screen, a Sidebar layout, Header and footer, an Approval request screen, a Welcome screen, and a List — the workhorse tabular view — with the announced landing templates rolling into this same gallery. Nothing here is a wireframe; each tile is a real screen you can drop in and start editing.
Step 3 — Add the List Template, Then Make It Yours
Pick the List template to feel the difference immediately. Thirty seconds after clicking it, I have a full screen: a header bar, a cleanly styled gallery of rows, and a quick-action bar — and if you open the tree view on the left, every piece is an ordinary modern control (TemplateGalleryList, Title, RectQuickActionBar) you can select, move, restyle, or delete. It ships with Lorem ipsum placeholder rows on purpose: that is the staged furniture. A staged home shows nicely; it becomes your home when your things are in it.
To finish it, point the gallery’s Items at a real table — Add data, choose your Dataverse table (in my sandbox that’s Accounts), and set Items to it so Contoso and friends replace the placeholder rows. Swap the header text, drop in your own icons — the icon library jumped from roughly 56 to about 180 this update, so you’re far less likely to settle for a stand-in — and the screen already looks like it belongs to your organization rather than to the default theme, without your having hand-laid a single row.
Where Templates Fit — and Where They Don’t
- They are a starting point, not a straitjacket. Once you add a template screen, it is just controls. If your app needs a layout the templates don’t cover, build that screen the old way — and consider lifting the template’s spacing and theme choices so it still matches.
- Modern controls are the foundation. Because these are Fluent 2 / modern controls underneath, everything you already know about modern controls applies — the property model, the theming, the accessibility behavior. If your organization has standardized on classic controls for a reason, weigh that before you build a whole app on the modern stack.
- Rollout is gradual. The named landing templates (hub, feature, list) are arriving environment by environment; if you don’t see all of them yet, you will, and the modern templates already in your New screen gallery are the same design-first idea. Adopt whatever is there as the house style.
- Consistency is a decision you make once. The value compounds only if the team actually starts from templates. One maker on templates and three starting blank gets you right back to the wall of mismatched blue buttons.
Wrapping Up
The best thing about these templates isn’t that they are pretty — it’s that they move the design decision to the front of the build, where a good default can make it for you, instead of the end, where you were going to wing it. A blank screen was never really free; you always paid for it later in the screens that didn’t match. Start from a room that is already furnished, move the couch to where you want it, and spend your afternoon on the part of the app only you can build — the logic that makes it worth opening at all.
