One of the useful functions in Experience Builder is the ability to edit your application in draft mode, publishing changes for your audience when you are ready for them to go live.
A limitation of this is that in order to update any map in your experience or the data in said map, those changes need to happen before you go live with your app changes. For public applications this can be quite problematic as you may need to add data to a map you are not ready for the public to see yet. This is something we recently came across with an existing public app that needs to be updated but we cannot add the data to the app before a set consultation date meaning all changes need to happen in a short turnaround on the go live date, which is not ideal. Of course we could just create a copy of the map and make the changes there but swapping a map in Experience Builder would break a lot of existing configurations.
My suggestion is that, like Experience Builder, Map Viewer offer a draft mode. Then as a map author you could make changes in the background, including the addition of data and layer configurations and test the changes to make sure they work before selecting publish once you are ready for the changes to go live. This would provide a safer back end environment for map authoring (especially public maps) and given it's functionality available in other parts of the ArcGIS Online platform seems like something that could be achievable.
Thanks
Anthony
