More than a petabyte and downloads
Monthly downloads in the range of petabytes: Flatpak as an app container is not space-saving.
According to extrapolations, the traffic is spread over 4.5 million downloads per month and 10 million updates of already installed Flatpaks. Robert McQueen estimates that flathub.org has around 800,000 active users. On the developer side, there are around 1200 programmers who take care of the creation and maintenance of Flatpaks.
An app store for Linux
At the same time, flathub.org is working on implementing a payment and donation system. Developers can decide whether users receive the Flatpaks for free, make a voluntary donation, or have to pay a minimum price. After deducting a small fee, the proceeds will go directly to developers. According to Robert McQueen, the legal form is currently being discussed for processing, but a Flathub LLC will be founded under US law. The service provider Stripe is to handle the financial transactions. A new status called "verified app" will also separate Flatpaks from the original developers from those of the community in the future. Most of the expansion and conversion steps have already been completed.
Flatpak as universal desktop API
Original developers of a software can take over an already existing Flatpak quite easily, after confirmation of the identity. As a successful example, Robert McQueen mentioned the password safe Keepass XC, which builds Flatpaks as part of its CI process and publishes them on flathub.org. With some help from the Flatpak community, OBS Studio was also able to integrate flathub.org into the build process.
Presence event in northern Italy and live stream
The development conference took place again this year as a face-to-face event. The organizers, KDE eV and the Gnome Foundation, chose Rovereto in northern Italy as the venue, but also streamed the lectures live via YouTube and via BigBlueButton. The Linux App Summit has been bringing Linux-related developer communities together since 2019 to promote the exchange of ideas and advance the software offering through presentations.
The talk about flathub.org is now available as a recorded live stream on the Linux App Summit YouTube channel.
