Custom visuals - pdf export

Yes — that's exactly the cause, not a bug you're hitting. Power BI's PDF and PowerPoint export skip any custom visual that isn't Microsoft-certified; uncertified visuals render fine in the browser/Desktop canvas but come out as blank space in the exported file. This has been a hard requirement for years, independent of whether the visual comes from AppSource or from your organisational visuals gallery.

The good news is that certification and public AppSource listing are two separate things. Microsoft's certification process (the same GitHub-based review pipeline used for AppSource visuals) can be completed and the resulting visual published as unlisted/private in AppSource — it doesn't have to show up in public marketplace search to satisfy the certification requirement, it just has to have gone through the review and be available for your tenant admin to add to the organisational visuals gallery.

One caveat: exactly how 'unlisted' publishing is configured in Partner Center has shifted a few times, so it's worth confirming the current option with Microsoft's certification docs or your partner rep before committing engineering time — the mechanics of that step aren't something I'd want you to take purely on my word.

If certification turns out to be too heavy for an internal-only visual, the practical workaround most teams land on is keeping a separate 'export-friendly' version of the report page built from native visuals for anyone who needs a PDF, while the richer custom-visual page stays for in-Service viewing.