Zoho has made a major change to how users are managed in Zoho Creator, aimed at stronger governance and security. Until now, giving someone administrative privileges meant giving them control over every app in the account, and over the account itself. Zoho Creator now has a new app admin role, a Create Application privilege, quick app sharing, and user export. This article summarises the changes. Two of them have their own detailed guides, linked below.
| Change | What it does |
|---|---|
| App admin | A new application-level role that gives a user full administrative control over chosen apps only, without account-level admin rights. |
| Create Application privilege | Lets a user create apps of their own. They automatically become app admin of each app they create. |
| Quick app share | Share an app from the Solutions section, without going through the Users tab first. |
| Export users | Export users for the whole account, or for a single app, with filters. |
An app admin has full administrative control over the applications they are assigned to, and no account-level privileges. They can manage the app's users, run backups, publish components, manage APIs, view the audit trail and logs, deploy across environments, and more, all limited to their assigned apps. An application can have more than one app admin.
Super admins and admins can assign the role in three ways: when adding a new user, from an existing user's detail view in the Users section, or from an application's Summary using Add App Admin. See Zoho Creator App Admin Role: What It Can Do and How to Assign It for the full list of permissions and the steps.
When the privilege is switched on, a user sees a Create Application button under the Applications section. Every app they create makes them its app admin, for that app alone. Their permissions in other apps do not change, so someone who is a developer in one app and a user in another stays that way. Super admins and admins can see every app created, adjust or remove a user's app admin access, and turn the privilege off at any time.
The privilege and the app admin role are independent. Turning the privilege off stops someone creating new apps, but they stay app admin of the apps they have already created. See Zoho Creator Create Application Privilege: Let Teams Build Their Own Apps.
An IT team manages the Creator account, and every department wants its own apps. Instead of routing each request through IT, the admin turns on the privilege for the HR lead. She builds an onboarding app and becomes its app admin automatically. She manages its users, publishes updates, and takes backups, without touching anything outside her app. Finance and Operations get the same arrangement for their own apps, so IT can delegate app creation while keeping governance of the account.
You can now share an app straight from the Solutions section. Click Share on an application card, or from the top bar while you are in edit or live mode, and pick people from your organisation. Choose whether to assign them as a User, Developer, or App admin, set their permissions, and click Share. It removes the need to go through the Users tab first.
You can export users at two levels: for the whole account, from the Users tab, or for a single app, from its Summary. Filters narrow the export by user type and permissions, and the account-level export supports several apps and different combinations of access criteria. For example, you can pull every developer across three apps, for an audit, a review, or recordkeeping.
This section is our own advice, not Zoho's.