Flatpak not being actively developed

From the «packed flat» department:
Title: Flatpak “not being actively developed anymore”
Author: Thom Holwerda
Date: Sat, 31 May 2025 06:26:16 +0000
Link: https://www.osnews.com/story/142467/flatpak-not-being-actively-developed-anymore/


At the Linux Application Summit[1] (LAS) in April, Sebastian Wick said that,
by many metrics, Flatpak[2] is doing great. The Flatpak application-packaging
format is popular with upstream developers, and with many users. More and
more applications are being published in the Flathub[3] application store,
and the format is even being adopted by Linux distributions like Fedora.
However, he worried that work on the Flatpak project itself had stagnated,
and that there were too few developers able to review and merge code beyond
basic maintenance.
↫ Joe Brockmeier at LWN[4]

After reading this article and the long list of problems the Flatpak project is
facing, I can’t really agree that “Flatpak is doing great”. Apparently, Flatpak
is in maintenance mode, while major problems remain untouched, because nobody
is working on the big-ticket items anymore. This seems like a big problem for a
project that’s still facing a myriad of major issues.

For instance, Flatpak still uses PulseAudio instead of Pipewire, which means
that if a Flatpak applications needs permission to play audio, it also
automatically gets permission to use the microphone. NVIDIA drivers also pose a
big problem, network namespacing in Flatpak is “kind of ugly”, you can’t
specify backwards-compatible permissions, and tons more problems. There’s a lot
of ideas and proposed solutions, but nobody to implement them, leaving Flatpak
stagnated.

Now that Flatpak is adopted by quite a few popular desktop Linux distributions,
it doesn’t seem particularly great that it’s having such issues with finding
enough manpower to keep improving it. There’s a clear push, especially among
developers of end-user focused applications, for everyone to use Flatpak, but
is that push really a wise idea if the project has stagnated? Go into any
thread where people discuss the use of Flatpaks, and there’s bound to be people
experiencing problems, inevitably followed by suggested fixes to use
third-party tools to break the already rather porous sandbox.

Flatpak feels like a project that’s far from done or feature-complete, causing
normal, every-day users to experience countless problems and issues. Reading
straight fromt he horse’s mouth that the project has stagnated and isn’t being
actively developed anymore is incredibly worrying.

Links:
[1]: https://linuxappsummit.org/ (link)
[2]: https://flatpak.org/ (link)
[3]: https://flathub.org/ (link)
[4]: https://lwn.net/Articles/1020571/ (link)