I recently ran into an issue where I wanted to test out a couple of the new pieces of functionality that Microsoft Teams apps can do (Notably, things around creating custom tabs within Teams). To test this out, I figured the easiest way would be to create a free teams account under my personal Microsoft account (So, not using Office 365), so I could play around with various test applications. What I found was that it is extremely hard to follow any guide to upload custom sideloaded apps to a free teams account, but it is possible!
If you want to skip right to the end to “What does work”, then I will forgive you, however first I want to outlay what exactly doesn’t work, and why this took me so long to figure out!
What Doesn’t Work
When guides out there (including Microsoft’s own documentation) describe uploading custom apps to Microsoft Teams, they talk about using the custom app “App Studio”. This is essentially an app, within Teams, that allows you to upload your own custom apps. That’s maybe a bit confusing, but in simple terms, it allows you to build a manifest file, upload logos, set privacy page URL’s all within a WYSIWYG editor, instead of editing JSON manually.
Once you’ve filled out all options, you’ll hit this step to start distributing your application.
The first option you are going to try is “Install”. Makes sense to try and install it for testing right? Then you’re probably likely to get this :
Or in text form :
Permissions needed. Ask your IT admin to add XYZ to this team.
Interestingly.. I am the IT admin since I created this teams account. This will lead you on a wild goose chase, notably to find either the “Teams Admin Center” or the “Office 365 Enterprise Admin Portal”. The problem is.. You aren’t an Office 365 customer. If you follow any of these links you find on the web to enable side loading applications, you’ll pretty often get the following.
You can’t sign in here with a personal account. Use your work or school account instead.
Very. Very. Frustrating.
Knowing that I couldn’t get around this limitation. Instead I decided to select the option to “Publish” from this same screen within App Studio. It looked promising until I got to a screen that said my “IT Admin would review my application and approve it”. Well.. I’m the IT admin so I guess I should receive an email soon with a nice link to approve everything? Nope! Nothing.
Doing this seems to just send it out into the ether. I never saw any link, option, or email to approve this app. Another dead end.
What Did Work
Finally, I saw another poor soul with the same issue and the usual unhelpful advice of logging into your non-existent Office 365 admin account. Then someone left a nothing comment.
You can still just upload the custom app normally.
What did “normally” mean in this context? Well I went back to App Studio and this time around selected the option to download my app to a zip.
Then at the very bottom of the Apps screen inside Teams, I selected the option to “Upload a customised app” (Note, *not* “Submit to app catalogue”).
And by magic, after a long wait of the screen doing nothing, it worked!
So what’s going on here? At a guess. I have a feeling that Free Teams Accounts have the option to sideload apps into the account, but they have other restrictions that cause the “App Studio” to report that the IT Admin will need to enable settings. It’s essentially bombing out and blaming a setting that it shouldn’t!
But there you have it. If you need to sideload custom apps into Free Teams, you *can* do it, you just can’t do it via App Studio.