We’re back with some new milestones thanks to the continued growth of Flathub as an app store and the incredible work of both our largely volunteer team and our growing app developer community:
- 70% of the most popular apps are verified
- 100+ curated quality apps
- 4 million active users
- Over 2 billion downloads
Flatpaks aren’t perfect, but they are really solid in almost all cases.
For the general user that just wants a simple way to download apps on Linux, it just works.
For power users, they will know already the upsides and downsides.
Edit: it they’re counting updates, then this number probably is accurate, so the bit questioning the number can probably be disregarded
I wonder how inflated that 4 million active user number is. They say it’s measured by “count[ing] the number of updates to that runtime we’ve served between two releases”. But that method doesn’t account for people distrohopping/reinstalling or QA testing by distros.
I maintain a snap package and something I really like about the Snap Store is the metrics they give. Note that this data is aggregated, I can’t see anything specific about a user. I am able to see:
- weekly active users
- distro and version
- CPU architecture
- country
- which version of app
- which channel (stable, beta, edge, etc)
But Flathub only measures total downloads. An app could get a thousand downloads and those thousand people could immediately uninstall the app and you would have no way of knowing that. With snap, you would see a week later a drop off of a thousand users.
Regardless of how you interpret the statistics, I think that this is a sign that the long vexed problem of software distribution for Linux has been significantly improved. Not quite solved, but for most desktop apps this is fantastic news.
