How to Disable Apps at Profile Level in Salesforce [2 ways]

While working as a system admin in an organization that uses Salesforce, I configured a custom app named Bank_CRM created specifically for finance. This app contains sensitive financial data, so it was required to add privacy to make it available only for the “manager” and system administrator profiles.

For that reason, we decided to disable this app from other profiles, such as “sales,” “support,” and “marketing,” which should not be able to use this app.

Here, I will explain various ways to disable custom apps at the profile level in Salesforce with step by step explanation.

Table of Contents

Disable Custom Apps at Profile Level in Salesforce

As per the above scenario, I already created a custom app named Bank_CRM and a custom profile for users at the manager level named the “Manager” profile.

There are two ways to disable custom apps at the profile level in Salesforce:

Disable custom app from the profile:
Disable the custom app from the lightning app builder:

Disable the Custom App From the Profile in Salesforce

In the following steps, I will show you how to disable custom apps at the profile level in Salesforce. This option we can use when we want to disable a custom app from one or two profiles.

1. On the Setup Home Page, in the Quick Find Box, search for Profiles and click on it.

2. You will see all standard and custom profiles. Here, you need to select the profile from which you want to disable the custom app. Click on that profile. Here, I’m selecting the custom sales profile.

Then click on the Edit option to make the changes and navigate to the Custom App Settings option.

3. There, you will see all custom apps. Find the app you want to hide from this profile and uncheck the visible checkbox. Here, I’m selecting the Bank_CRM app.

Then click the Save button.

This is how we can disable custom apps at the profile level in Salesforce.

Disable the Custom App From the Lightning App Builder in Salesforce

Using the following steps, we can disable the custom app from the lightning app builder for multiple profiles.

1. Go to the Setup in the Quick Find Box, search for App Manager, and click on it.

2. In the app manager, you will see all standard and custom apps are present. There, you need to select the custom app that you want to disable from some profiles and click the dropdown arrow. Then select the Edit option so that we can edit access to the profile for this app.

3. When you click on the edit button, you will see the Lightning App Builder page. There, you need to select User Profiles under App Settings. Then you can see there are two types of user profiles:

Available Profiles: In this section. all standard and custom profiles are present.
Selected Profiles: Those profiles who have access to this app are present in the selected profiles.

As per our scenario, we want only the manager and system administrator profiles to access this app. So, we need to remove other profiles from the selected profile section. To remove it, select the profiles that you want to remove and click on the left arrow.

After that, click the Save button to save the changes.

4. Now here you can see only system administrator and manager profiles can access the Bank_CRM app.

Proof of Concept:

5. Now, to check whether the applied changes have been applied, navigate to the profile that we removed from the selected profiles section. Here, I selected employee profile users and then logged in with that user to check whether he could access the bank_CRM app or not.

6. When I logged in as an employee profile user and searched for the Bank_CRM app in the App Launcher, No Results were present. That means this app is disabled for employee profile users.

7. Then, we navigate to the manager profile and log in with the manager profile user to see whether he can access the app or not.

8. When I logged in as a manager profile user and searched for the Bank_CRM app, I could see it in the search results. That means this app is accessible to manager profile users.

This is how we can disable the custom app from the lightning app builder for multiple profiles.

Conclusion

I hope you have got an idea about why there is a need to disable apps at the profile level in Salesforce. In that, I have explained step by step various ways to disable the custom app, and I also have explained when we can disable the custom app from the profile and disable the custom app from the lightning app builder in Salesforce.