Currently, Business Central allows partners and customers to opt out of app updates for minor version upgrades, but this flexibility is not available for major version upgrades.

This limitation creates significant challenges for customers operating in highly regulated industries, where every update must undergo rigorous testing and validation before deployment.

Problem:

During the transition from a test environment to production on a new major version, new app versions may be released in the interim.

This results in discrepancies between the tested environment and the production environment, potentially invalidating the testing process and causing compliance issues.

Proposed Solution:

To better support customers with strict regulatory requirements, we propose one of the following enhancements:

1. Allow opt-out of app updates during major version upgrades, similar to the current functionality for minor versions, this allows the app updates to happen in advance and in a controlled manner.
2. Introduce a version-locking mechanism, where administrators can specify the exact app versions to be installed during a major upgrade. This would ensure consistency between test and production environments.

Benefits:

• Ensures compliance with regulatory testing requirements.
• Reduces risk of unexpected behavior in production.
• Improves confidence in Business Central as a platform for regulated industries.

Other suggestions to solve this challenge are welcome as well. The end result should be that it is possible to have a 100% match between production and test after the production upgrade even if app updates on app source happen.