A discount goes out because someone tapped a notification on a phone. Nobody can say who approved it, when, or on what basis. The step existed, briefly, in an app.
On 31 August 2026 that app goes away, and a lot of small businesses are about to find out how much of their process was living inside it.
What changes on 31 August
Microsoft retires the Power Automate mobile app for iOS and Android. It comes out of the App Store and Google Play, and it stops receiving updates and support, according to Microsoft's list of Power Platform deprecations (checked: 2026-08-20).
Two things stop working with it. Push notifications sent by the "Send me a mobile notification" action have nowhere to arrive. The home-screen widgets that let someone run a flow from their phone stop as well.
Your flows are fine. Automated, scheduled and instant flows keep running exactly as before. Microsoft's mobile app overview sets out the replacements (checked: 2026-08-20). Approvals move to the Approvals app in Microsoft Teams, flow management to the Power Automate portal in a mobile browser, and instant flows to Power Apps mobile.
One detail deserves more attention than the retirement itself. The "Send me a mobile notification" action stays in the designer, so it will still sit in your flow, still look configured, and still do nothing.
A step that fails loudly gets fixed on Monday. A step that fails quietly gets discovered in a quarter, usually by a customer.
Why this is an operational problem, not a mobile problem
Swapping one notification channel for another takes an afternoon. That is not the interesting part.
Ask where the approval itself is recorded. In most small businesses I look at, the honest answer is that it isn't. There is a message, and there is an outcome, and between them there is a person who remembers. The notification was doing three jobs at once: telling someone work was waiting, capturing their decision, and standing in for a record that nobody ever built.
That arrangement works until the approver is on holiday, or leaves, or a customer asks why they were given fifteen percent off. It also fails silently under load, because nothing in it can tell the difference between an approval that is pending and one that was never seen.
A step nobody can reconstruct afterwards is a habit that has worked so far, dressed as a control.
The retirement is useful precisely because it is a deadline you did not choose. It forces the question that never makes it onto the list on its own. It is also not the only one this autumn: the Exchange Web Services retirement lands on many of the same tenants.
Build an approval that survives its tools
The work here is small. It is mostly deciding things out loud that were previously assumed.
Name the owner, the trigger and the outcome
Write down three sentences per approval: what starts it, who decides, and what has to be true for it to pass.
If you cannot write the third sentence, you do not have an approval, you have a person being asked permission, and no tool will fix that.
Keep this in plain language. "Any discount over ten percent on a first order" is a rule. "Big discounts" is not.
Record the decision where the work lives
The decision belongs on the deal, the order or the ticket, not in a chat message. That is the difference between a system you can audit and a story you have to reconstruct. When approvals sit in the record, a new hire can see what normally happens, and a dispute takes minutes instead of an afternoon of searching mailboxes.
For a team already running Dynamics 365 or another CRM, this is a field and a stage, not a project. Our CRM and sales automation work usually starts by moving decisions like this out of inboxes and into the pipeline, because everything else downstream depends on it.
Make the notification an explicit step
Send the notification deliberately, with a Teams or email action you can see in the flow. Microsoft's notification guidance covers the pattern for failures too: add a notification action and set the run-after condition on the preceding step to "has failed" (checked: 2026-08-20).
What matters here is visibility. The notification becomes a step you can see in the process, rather than a property of an app somebody happened to install.
Give silence a meaning
Decide what happens when nobody answers. After two days it escalates to you, expires, or sits there. Any of the three is a defensible answer. Not choosing means the default is "sit there", and that default has a cost nobody measures.
Check the Teams side before you need it
If you move approvals to the Approvals app in Teams, confirm your app permission policies allow it. Microsoft flags this as an administrator action to take before the retirement, and it is the sort of thing that surfaces at the worst moment.
What not to do
Do not rebuild the same fragile step in a new channel. Moving a notification from one app to another leaves you with the same missing record, six months later.
Do not automate an approval nobody can describe. If the rule lives only in one person's judgement, automating it just hides the judgement. Write the rule first, and accept that some approvals should stay conversations.
Do not add approvals because you can. Every gate slows work down, and a process with six approvals usually has five that exist because someone once made a mistake. Keep the ones that carry real risk.
Do not treat the deadline as the whole job. Getting notifications working again by 31 August is maintenance. Knowing who approved what is the thing worth having.
When Teams is enough, and when it is not
Teams Approvals is a good fit when the decision is simple, the approver is one person or a small group, and the record can live alongside the conversation. Plenty of small firms need nothing more, and paying for more would be a waste.
Look further when the approval changes a customer-facing commitment, or when it has to be visible on the deal months later. The same applies when several people can approve depending on value, or when the decision feeds reporting. At that point the approval belongs in the system that already holds the work, with the notification as a thin layer on top.
The retirement on 31 August is a small maintenance job with a date attached. The question underneath it is older and better: when someone asks who approved this, can you answer without asking anyone?