All users will be able to see basic fields of customers. However only the Admin can see the Advanced fields. As such I set the Row Owner on the “Role” column.
Correct. When Row Owners are applied to a table, rows will only be downloaded to the device if the signed in user has a matching user email or role that matches the value in the row owner column.
Yeah, it can be confusing when you look at the data editor, as the data editor still downloads and has access to all rows, but greys them out. Viewing relations and single value columns will still find them since the rows are there, but in reality those rows will not downloaded in the published app.