Why Most AppSheet Projects Fail (And How to Avoid It)

I have seen hundreds of AppSheet projects. The ones that fail almost never fail because of a technical problem. They fail because of a process problem that happened before a single line of code was written.

Here are the five most common failure patterns, and what to do instead.

The most common mistake is opening AppSheet and starting to build before you fully understand the problem you are solving.

This feels productive. You are making progress. But you are building on a foundation of assumptions, and assumptions in app development are expensive. Every wrong assumption costs you rebuild time later.

What to do instead: Spend at least one full session on discovery before touching the builder. Map out: Who are the users? What data do they work with? What are the five most common tasks they perform? What does "done" look like for each task? What are the edge cases?

A good discovery session takes two to four hours and saves ten to twenty hours of rework.

When people move from spreadsheets to AppSheet, they often try to replicate the spreadsheet structure exactly. One sheet becomes one table. The columns stay the same. The layout mirrors the old file.

This is a mistake because spreadsheets and relational databases have fundamentally different structures. A spreadsheet might have a "Client" column that repeats the client name on every row. A proper AppSheet data model has a Clients table and a foreign key relationship. The difference matters enormously for performance, data integrity, and the quality of the app you can build.

What to do instead: Normalize your data model before you build. Identify your entities (Clients, Projects, Tasks, Users) and create a separate table for each. Then define the relationships between them.

Building an app in isolation and then presenting it to users at launch is a recipe for rejection. Users have opinions. They have workflows you did not know about. They have preferences about how information is displayed that seem trivial but are actually dealbreakers for adoption.

What to do instead: Show users a working prototype after week one. Get feedback. Adjust. Show them again after week two. The goal is to make users feel like they built the app with you, not that you built it for them.

Documentation feels like overhead. It is not. It is the difference between an app that your team can maintain and grow, and an app that only works as long as the original builder is available to fix things.

Every expression in your app should have a note explaining what it does and why. Every automation should have a description of its trigger and its effect. Every table should have a description of what it represents.

What to do instead: Document as you build, not after. It takes thirty seconds to add a note to an expression while you are writing it. It takes thirty minutes to reconstruct your reasoning six months later.

An app launch is not the end of the project. It is the beginning of the feedback loop. Real users doing real work will find edge cases, request new features, and identify workflows you did not anticipate.

The apps that deliver the most value are the ones that are continuously improved based on real usage data. The apps that get abandoned are the ones where the builder treated launch as done.

What to do instead: Plan for a 30-day post-launch support window. Schedule a check-in at day 7, day 14, and day 30 to review what is working and what needs adjustment.

Every one of these failure patterns comes down to the same thing: treating AppSheet as a technical problem when it is actually a process problem. The technology is the easy part. Understanding the business, the users, and the workflows is where the real work happens.