Direct Lake Requires Workspace Permissions, Breaking Power BI App Sharing and Audience Segmentation

[barztown]

Direct Lake mode currently forces every report consumer to be added directly to the workspace in order to view reports that use Lakehouse tables. This defeats the entire purpose of:

• Power BI Apps

• Audience views

• Role-based access

• Separation of development from consumption

Because of this limitation:

• I cannot publish a Power BI App containing Direct Lake reports unless
  every single user is added to the workspace.

• If I use App Audiences, users who are not workspace members get errors and cannot see the Direct Lake content.

• This forces me to either:

  1. Give dozens/hundreds of users workspace-level access (which is inappropriate and messy), OR

  2. Avoid Direct Lake entirely even though it is the recommended, optimized Fabric experience.

This effectively blocks enterprise adoption of Direct Lake for any scenario where:

• Not all users belong in the dev workspace

• Audience segmentation is required

• RLS or scoped access is required

• Workspaces are used as development/staging areas

Ask / Proposal:
Allow Direct Lake models and reports to be consumed through Power BI Apps without requiring workspace membership — the same way Import and DirectQuery models work today.

This is absolutely essential for:

• Data governance

• Security boundaries

• App-based distribution

• Enterprise scalability

• Real-world deployment patterns

Direct Lake becomes unusable for most organizations without this.