So in the future, the app won’t be able to access your data or hardware without you allowing it. But the Flatpak developers are already working on an API that will allow controlled access outside the sandbox and put the user in charge of it. Most apps need to communicate with the rest of the system (load/save files, send notifications, sound/video server,…) and currently there need to be holes in the sandbox to make this possible.

The sandbox is currently not completely encapsulated. This way, the app can run pretty much independently on the underlying system. Dependencies that are missing in the runtime need to be bundled with the app. There are currently three distinguished runtimes (GNOME, KDE, FreeDesktop). The app can use a so-called runtime which is a well-defined environment that provides the app with the most common components of the platform the app is built on. How does it work?Ī application runs in a sandbox and it has all their dependencies present within the sandbox. There are also personal repositories with Flatpak for Debian Stable and Ubuntu. Besides Fedora Flatpak is already available in Arch, Debian (Experimental), Mageia, openSUSE (still as xdg-app). It was recently renamed to Flatpak to reflect the fact that it’s finally ready for broader usage. We covered the Flatpak release announcement a few days ago here on the Fedora Magazine, but if you’ve never heard of Flatpak before that, you may have heard of xdg-app which was a development name for this technology. The probably biggest practical benefit for users is that you can run any app no matter what version of Fedora you’re using. The two main goals of Flatpak are the creation of a single installation file that can distributed to users across distributions, and running apps as isolated from the rest of the system as possible. One of the main features of Fedora 24 Workstation is better support for Flatpak - a new, distribution agnostic format for packaging and distributing Linux desktop apps.

Flatpak spotify