So, if one wishes to apply an operation row by row in dplyr, one can use the rowwise function, for example: Applying a function to every row of a table using dp
As found in the comments and the other answer, the correct way of doing this is to use ungroup().
The operation rowwise(df) sets one of the classes of df to be rowwise_df. We can see the methods on this class by examining the code here, which gives the following ungroup method:
#' @export
ungroup.rowwise_df <- function(x) {
class(x) <- c( "tbl_df", "data.frame")
x
}
So we see that ungroup is not strictly removing a grouped structure, instead it just removes the rowwise_df class added from the rowwise function.