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scottoreily

And yet no one else has

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Flatpak has done this better than iOS has.

- Completely FOSS stack

- Uses multiple repositories (no lock-in)

- Everything is sandboxed with Bubblewrap

- Fine-grained permission control that offers more than iOS: control whether apps can access the network, which directories an app can access, if it can print, and even whether or not it can access PulseAudio.

- Cross-platform: runtimes are OCI container images and can be targeted on any distro that supports Flatpak (which is almost all of them).

It's gained adoption from a number of recognizable FOSS and proprietary names: Zoom, Spotify, Steam, Firefox, VLC, Discord, Libreoffice, Skype, Inkscape, both Minecraft and Minetest, Microsoft Teams, Krita, IntelliJ IDEs (both Community and Professional), and Blender are available as Flatpaks through Flathub.

GNOME and KDE release almost all their apps as Flatpaks through the `gnome` and `kdeapps` Flatpak repos, and copy them over to Flathub when they're confident that Flatpak-ing didn't introduce any bugs.

Flatpak also clutters your hard disk with gigabytes of copied libraries and other data. I had to deinstall it to prevent a system crash, because my root partition went out of space rapidly - source of the problem: Two flatpak apps.

Isn't this the problem with iOS apps too? They can't share libs or .so between them, which is why each iOS app is colossal for no good reason, eg. Google Sheets 180MB alone, Google Docs also 180MB, YouTube 280MB..... insane sizes for these.

Similar in character, but it's probably a factor of 10 worse with Flatpak. With your examples on iOS, the bloat is stuff that's common to the google apps but not part of the platform. With flatpak, it includes stuff that is part of the platform but can't be relied on to be the right version.

It would be nice if Apple would let packages signed by the same key share versioned libraries between them, but I suspect relatively few developers would be able to take advantage of that. Maybe only google and microsoft, to a rough order of approximation.

Does its sandboxing support fake (or altered) access? That might be the additional permission control needed. For example, to grant fake access to the audio, the program will work but there will be no audio output (and all audio input will be silent); or you can specify to save audio to a file instead of making it immediately audible, or change the volume control for that program only.

Pretty cool. But it will never have the momentum android and iOS have

Android has. (Also I assume a pile of other, no longer available/not very successful mobile OSes, but the ecosystem is just Apple and Android at the moment).

Android has far too many apps that refuse to work unless you give certain permissions. One of my banking apps needs the camera permission to work at all. The permission prompt states it's to digitally cash checks, but it asks at startup and if you deny permission the app quits immediately. Most delivery apps won't work without giving GPS permission. The iOS app store does not allow this kinda bs.

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