When you are using Fiori in SAP S/4HANA, the most common problem you are likely to encounter is the infamous Fiori “could not open app” error.  This blogs leads you to a guided decision tree to help you resolve these issues. 

So you’ve set up your Fiori Foundation, activated a bunch of Fiori apps, created your test user with the recommended authorizations, logged in to your Fiori Launchpad, started selecting tiles and sooner or later (probably sooner) you see the infamous Fiori “could not open app” error.

What went wrong? Should you really wait and try again later?

TIP: Probably not!

For the novice UX Lead it’s an annoying problem without a clear solution. What should you do next? Who do you need to call?

Even worse is later when everything is working fine in your development, you transport your apps to QA or Production system and lo and behold, that *&@#$@! error is back again.

Search on Fiori “could not open app” in the SAP Support launchpad and you’ll find far too many notes trying to explain this problem from all sorts of angles without giving a consolidated picture of what is going on, or how to confidently approach this error when you find it on a different app.

In the SAP S/4HANA Regional Implementation team, we are privileged to work with many customers implementing SAP S/4HANA, so this is an error we see raised in far too many SAP Incidents also.

The majority of the time the solution comes from understanding the 3 common causes of this error and what to do next.

The 3 Common Causes of “could not open app” Errors 

The 3 common causes are:

• Missing Authorizations – VERY common – especially in QA and Production systems
• Missing Configuration – Common – especially if you are first setting up your Fiori apps
• Kernel or App errors – Much less common

IMPORTANT: Always resolve Missing Authorizations and Missing Configuration *before* checking for Kernel and App errors.  There are many messages that show in the Console log that can be misleading or simply side effects of missing authorizations or missing configuration.

Now working through these common causes, their symptoms, and resolving them in the most effective way takes a little expertise. You’ll also need access to:

• Your Web Browser Console Log
• SAPGUI transactions SU53, STAUTHTRACE, /IWFND/ERROR_LOG in your Fiori Frontend Server
• SAPGUI transactions SU53, STAUTHTRACE, /IWBEP/ERROR_LOG in your (backend) S/4AHANA Core Server

Sure you could start trying those out now, but do you know what you are looking for? And when you’ve identified the cause, do you know what’s the best way to fix it?  Trying to fix missing authorizations or missing ICF nodes or missing OData Services one-by-one is a recipe for late nights and crunched timelines on all the other work you could be doing.

There’s often an easier way.

Resolving Fiori app “Could not open app” errors in SAP S/4HANA

So before you raise that SAP Incident and spin your heels waiting for an answer, to save you frustration, try working your way through this SAP Guided Answer tree

Think of it as a step-by-step blog to increasing your expertise in solving one of the most common Fiori errors you’ll ever see.  You can even find out how to use that Console Log in your web browser.

Just scroll down, read the typical symptoms, and start by clicking on the “Explain how to identify and resolve…” button that matches your best guess as to what is causing the problem right now.  Here’s a snapshot of the entry page to give you the idea.

Why didn’t we just write this up as a blog? Well for starters it would be a very long blog 🙁 and secondly we find you might go back and forth a little depending on the app, so a guided answer makes it easy for you to do that.

You can add your feedback in the tree or on this blog if you have any comments.

Guided Answers are a fairly new approach we are using to support you in resolving these sorts of common but potentially complex problems. You can find SAP Guided Answers for other common problems in the Guided Answers viewer, and you’ll find Guided Answers listed in some SAP Notes.

If you have any requests for new Guided Answers please add them in the comments.

Becoming a SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA guru

You’ll find much more on our SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA wiki

Brought to you by the S/4HANA RIG