Flatpak 1.6 Released With Bits For Supporting Paid App Store, Better Self-Sandboxing

Flatpak 1.6 was released today as the culmination of the Flatpak 1.5 development series.

One of the biggest additions for 1.5/1.6 is the introduction of protected/authenticated downloads support with Flatpak as part of their plans to ultimately allow "app purchasing" via Flathub whether it be a donation/pay-what-you-want type scenario or ultimately allowing commercial applications to become available via Flathub. Flatpak 1.6 introduces the preliminary interfaces for this authenticated/protected Flatpak handling for "paid" apps.

Flatpak 1.6 also has improvements on self-sandboxing, a new permission option for direct CUPS access for printing, and various clean-ups and other code improvements. There is also a new portal API as Matthias Clasen talked about today on his blog.

Those building Flatpak 1.6 from source can acquire it from GitHub.