Hi everyone,

I want to give an update on how Flatpak development is going as it has recently been moving quickly. Earlier this month a 1.12.0 release (and two follow-up releases) were made to fix an important security issue, and to bring other important features to users. The security fixes were also backported to some older branches that are still in use.

Now development work is underway on the 1.13.x unstable series that will lead up to 1.14.0, and already several bug fixes are merged or ready for code review. See GitHub for all the details. There is a significant backlog of issues and we should be able to fix many of the important ones in the next release.

Much of the development work lately was made possible by the funding contributed by you all, and I'm sincerely grateful for that. I believe funding is an important part of making open source software projects sustainable, and Flatpak should have funding independent of any one organization, since it's an independent project used by so many. Flatpak is an important part of the modernization of the Linux desktop and it is already vastly improving the experience of users and app developers. It's exciting and fulfilling to work on the project and see the community celebrate its successes.

I hope to also expand the scope of the work enabled by this fundraising to portals, which are critical to protecting users' right to privacy and realizing the vision of securely running apps on Linux.

Best,

-- Phaedrus Leeds