Customize an application and stay upgradeable

Goal

Change what an installed application gives you, and keep the change when the application ships a new version. You need platform.apps.read to see the decisions and platform.apps.develop to answer them, plus the ordinary write permission for whatever you are editing.

What you may edit

An application installs components. These are the ones you edit on their own screens, and the platform records that you did:

dashboards
business rules
workflows
notification rules and templates
choice values
navigation modules and menu items

Five kinds of component stay with the application and cannot be edited on an installed copy:

Component	Why it stays with the application
Roles and their permissions	Who can do what is a security decision
Approval policies	Who signs off is governed, not configured per tenant
Agents and skills	These are the fences on what an agent may do
Detection rules	They decide what the platform raises a finding about
Tables and their columns	Every other component is written against them

Editing one of those returns a message saying the application governs it. An application can narrow the list further, and it can never widen it.

Three things this does not cover yet

Catalog forms. An application can install a service catalog form, and there is no screen to edit one. Nothing is lost at an update, because there is nothing for you to change.

Field presentation. A field’s card, width, help text and visibility are not yet tracked. You can change them, and an update to the application that installed the table will overwrite them without asking. Re-apply the change after an update until this is closed.

Agents and skills through the Agent Designer. Editing a shipped agent or its charter in the Agent Designer is allowed and is not recorded, so the next update of the application that installed it puts the shipped version back and nothing warns you. Make the change in the application instead, or expect to re-apply it. Editing a shipped skill on the AI Skills page is refused outright, which is the same rule arriving at a different door.

Steps

Open the component on its own screen and change it. For example: Admin → Dashboards → your dashboard, or Admin → Notifications → Rules.
Save. Nothing else is needed. The platform records the edit against the application that installed the component.
When the application publishes a new version, open Admin → Marketplace and click Update. Before the click the dialog says what your own edits will do to this update: how many are left alone, how many you have taken over, and how many the application also changed.
Click Update. Components you edited and the application did not touch are left exactly as you saved them.
If the application changed a component you had also changed, nothing is overwritten. The result says so in amber and the application stays on its current version.
Open Admin → Installed Apps, find the application and click the Customizations and updates action (the icon’s tooltip). A row with an open question is marked Needs a decision, and the icon carries a small dot, so you do not have to open every application to find the one waiting on you. Most installed applications carry neither: zero questions is the ordinary state, not a count that failed to load.
For each question, click Review. You see three columns: what the application last installed, your version now, and what the application now ships.
Click Use the application version or Keep my version. Add a note if you want the next reviewer to know why.
Answer every open question, then run the update again. It now completes and the version moves.

If nothing is waiting, the Customization decisions section shows one sentence instead of a table: updates apply by themselves unless you changed the same thing. On control, that is every installed application except one decided question on an Asset app CMDB choice; the Incident app has none at all. The tabs (Awaiting a decision, Application version used, Our version kept) only appear once there is at least one question of any kind, decided or not. Three empty tabs were how an owner with nothing to decide read the dialog as broken.

Taking a component over

If you want a component to stop following the application entirely:

Open Admin → Installed Apps and click the Customizations and updates action on the application.
Scroll to What this application installed. The lead sentence says what taking over does and that it is rarely needed. Components are grouped by kind (Tables, Choices, Rules, Notifications, Agents, and so on), collapsed by default with a count on each group’s header; taken-over rows are listed first inside a group. Use the search box to find one by name without opening every group. Each row shows a readable label (a table’s display name, or a choice’s field and value, in your own language) with its state next to it: Follows the application, Edited here, or Taken over. Hover a row to see the raw technical name the installer actually stored, if you need to match it against the package.
Click Take over on the component. The confirmation says what changes.
Confirm.

From then on updates skip that component and say so, you stop receiving changes to it, and you never see a question about it again. Your version stays exactly as it is. The record of where the component came from is kept, so uninstalling the application still removes it.

The five kinds in the table above are listed with Not available and the reason on hover. They cannot be taken over.

Verification

You know it worked when:

your edit is still there after an update that touched other components;
the update dialog names your edits before you click, not after;
an update that hit a double change lands amber, the version does not move, and the Customization decisions action shows the count;
answering every question and re-running the update moves the version.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause	Fix
Saving returns “governed by the platform”	The component is one of the five the application keeps	Change it in the application, or ask whoever publishes it
The update keeps being offered after it said it worked	Open decisions hold the version back	Answer them under Customization decisions, then update again
Your edit was reverted with no question asked	Field presentation, or an Agent Designer change, is not tracked	Re-apply the change after the update; both are known gaps
The message says your change was saved but not recorded	The application declares this kind of component non customizable	The change is in place and the next update will overwrite it; ask whoever publishes the application

How it connects

The update itself is covered by the application update flow in Admin → Marketplace. Uninstalling is a separate action and keeps your data.

Uninstalling switches the application off rather than deleting it. Its rules, workflows, notifications, forms and catalog items stop running and disappear from menus and the portal. Their run history, the requests filed through the catalog, your records and the audit trail all stay readable. A catalog category stays visible while another active item still uses it. Removing an application never deletes its tables or records. Installing the application again switches the same parts back on, with your history intact.

If Manage Apps shows Removal incomplete, the row names what was left behind and why. Fix the cause, then use Retry removal on the same row.