2 Billion Downloads & Other Milestones from 2024 So Far

Announcements
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It's been a busy year, and our platform and developer community-building efforts are paying off. Let's take a look at what we've been up to over the last six months, and measure its effect.

At the beginning of the year we announced an incredible milestone for Flathub: over one million active users. But we didn't slow down; in February we attended FOSDEM, then announced improved app moderation and app brand colors in preparation for some new features. Those efforts ultimately launched with the new homepage and featured app banners in April.

Milestones​

Flathub: 70% of top apps verified, 100+ curated quality apps, 4 million active users, 2 billion downloads

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:

Over 1,000 apps have been verified by their developers on Flathub, including 70% of the top 30 most popular apps. Developers of verified apps are ultimately in charge of their own app listings, and their updates are delivered directly to Flathub users while passing our automated testing and human review of things like permission changes.

100+ curated quality apps​

Over 100 apps are now passing our quality guidelines that include checks like icon contrast on both light and dark backgrounds, quality screenshots, and consistent app naming and descriptions so users get a better experience browsing Flathub. These guidelines are what enable us to curate and display visually appealing and consistent banners on the new home page, for example.

This means that between late February and July, the developers of over 100 apps went out of their way to improve—and sometimes make significant changes to—their apps' metadata to get ready for these new guidelines and features on Flathub. We're proud of these developers who have gone above and beyond, and we look forward to even more apps opting in over time.

Developers, if you'd like to see your app featured on the home page, please ensure you are following these guidelines! We've heard from app developers that getting your app featured not only gives a bump in downloads, but can also bring an increase in contributions to your project if it's open source.

4 million active users​

Six months ago we passed one million active users based on a simple if conservative estimate of updates to a common runtime version we had served. Using that same methodology, we now estimate we have over 4 million active users!

As a reminder, this data is publicly available and anyone can check our work. In fact, I personally would love if we could work with a volunteer from the community to automate this statistic so we don't have to do manual collation each time. If you're interested, check out this GitHub issue.

Over 2 billion downloads​

Those users have been busy, too: to date we have served over two billion downloads of different apps to people using different Linux flavors all around the world. This is a huge community of people trusting Flathub as their source of apps for Linux.

Thank you!​

Thank you to our download-happy community of users who have put their trust in Flathub as their source of apps on Linux. Thank you to all of the developers of those apps, and in particular those developers who have chosen to follow the quality guidelines to help make Flathub a more consistent and engaging space. And thank you to every contributor to Flathub itself whether you are someone who fixed a typo in the developer documentation, helped translate the store, contributed mockups and design work, or spent countless hours keeping everything running smoothly.

As a grassroots effort, we wouldn't have become the Linux app store without each and every one of you. ❤️

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://docs.flathub.org/blog/2-billion-downloads-2024
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I was never very good at Maths, and I might have missed something, but a “reality check” says 2 000 000 000 downloads divided by 4 000 000 users equals 500 downloads per user. Even allowing for updates that seems rather a lot.

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It’s tempting to do that math, but they’re not equivalent measures. We estimate 4 million active users of Flathub, versus 2 billion total Flatpak downloads ever from Flathub.

“Active users” is calculated by counting the number of updates we delivered to a specific component of the FDo-sdk during the last FDo-sdk release cycle. So a fresh install is not counted as active until it is updated, and a stale install that wasn’t used during the time period isn’t counted as active, either.

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So you only count active users, but total Flatpak downloads ever. Shouldn’t they be equivalent measures - so a figure for active users is matched with a figure for active Flatpak downloads (perhaps calculated by whether they have been updated this time round)?

I have an interest in this as I have published a Flatpak. I feel that it is important to be honest with myself about its utility, so I am using comparing various methods of finding out how much it is used and how effective it is.
I think that the same applies to Flathub - it should try hard to get at meaningful facts about usage so as to be honest with itself about its effectiveness.

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That’s basically what @cassidyjames says, you can’t start mixing up those numbers, as they are not equivalent measures. Guess that’s also why the got separate sections in the post.

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Who are the figures aimed at?

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It’s aimed at anyone curious about the growth of Flathub. :slight_smile:

Personally, I find it super valuable to share the estimate of active users when talking with developers of existing apps that either aren’t yet on Flathub or aren’t yet verified; it helps demonstrate that there is an audience here using Flathub on Linux, and that coming to Flathub might be more worth their time than they initially thought.

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Whether a developer or a novice user?

I would have thought it would have made sense to use a sensible and believable figure such as actve downloads being perhaps “apps which have been downloaded or updated this year”. To me “2 billion downloads” without any qualification immediately whiffs of (to be polite) maximising the figure at all costs.

I am a big fan of Flatpaks, I believe them to be the future, so I would like Flathub to be respected for meaningful claims.