Building enterprise data apps has always involved a frustrating tradeoff: you either lock down your data so tightly that only engineers can touch it, or you open it up and hope nobody sees something they shouldn't. Replit and Databricks are now taking direct aim at that problem with a deepened integration that puts per-user data governance at the center of the app-building experience, and the public preview is open for sign-ups today.

What Just Changed

The headline feature of this update is user-level authorization inside Databricks Apps built with Replit. The app now acts with the calling user's identity, and Unity Catalog policies, including row-level filters, column masks, and table access control lists, are enforced automatically. In plain terms: the same app can show an HR analyst a full org chart while showing a department manager only their own team, with zero custom filtering code in the application itself.

User authorization enables fine-grained access control by applying Unity Catalog features like row-level filters and column masks to app activity, keeping access control consistent with workspace governance and avoiding hardcoded permission logic in the app. The practical upshot is that when the app accesses data, the user's existing Unity Catalog permissions apply automatically. For example, if a table includes a row filter that limits visibility by region, the app only returns the rows that the user is allowed to query, with no additional filtering logic needed in the app.

The Stack Under the Hood

To understand why this matters, it helps to know what the two pieces of this integration actually do. Databricks AppKit is available inside Replit, a leader in collaborative, agentic app development. The integration allows app developers to develop in Replit and deploy on Databricks, starting from natural language prompts to build data-aware applications.