Flatpak 1.5.2 Continues Work On Authentication Support In Push To Handling Paid Apps

Introduced last month was the Flatpak 1.5.1 development build that provided initial support for protected/authenticated downloads of Flatpaks as the fundamental infrastructure work towards allowing paid or donation-based applications within Flathub or other Flatpak-based "app stores" on Linux.

Flatpak 1.5.2 is out this Friday morning and it has continued work on this focus for authenticated/protected downloads. There has been new API coverage around the authentication code, an OCI authenticator is now bundled, a simple user/password authentication-driven option similar to HTTP-based authentication, and related work towards opening up new use-cases for Flatpak.

Flatpak 1.5.2 also has some fixes to its new self-sandboxing support, documentation improvements, support for file descriptor forwarding, improvements to the new permission-set command, and other changes.

More details on Flatpak 1.5.2 can be found via GitHub.

For those interested in more technical details on the Flatpak authentication/protected apps support, after the 1.5.1 development release last month Red Hat's Alexander Larsson who continues leading Flatpak development offered up more details on the design of the planned purchases support.