Idea Summary
APEX should provide a supported public API for creating, merging, and deleting application working copies.

Working-copy metadata can already be queried through APEX metadata views. However, working copies can currently be created and managed only manually through APEX Builder. This prevents them from being incorporated into automated development and deployment processes.

Use Case
Potential use cases include:

• Creating a working copy automatically before importing or replacing an application.
• Preserving the current state of an application as a temporary backup before a deployment.
• Creating a review copy when developers promote changes from individual development environments into a shared development or test environment.
• Allowing reviewers to compare and merge incoming changes visually in APEX Builder, even when they do not work directly with Git.
• Creating a working copy automatically when a feature branch or pull request is created.
• Supporting rollback, production-drift resolution, and environment synchronization workflows.

For example, before importing a production application back into development to resolve drift, a CI/CD process could create a working copy of the current development application. The production version could then be imported as the main application, while the working copy would preserve the development changes for visual comparison and selective merging.

Preferred Solution (Optional)
A supported API could include operations such as:

• Create a working copy.
• Merge selected or all changes from a working copy into the main application.
• Delete a working copy.
• Rename or update the description of a working copy.

Exposing these operations would make working copies much more useful for CI/CD automation, code review, deployment safety, backups, and drift management.