There is a recurring theme of users of non-x86_64 platforms trying and failing to install apps which are not available for their platform. Just in the last few days:
Perhaps it would be kind to add stub refs for each platform an app doesn’t support, eol’ed with reason “This app is only available for $PLATFORMS”?
the info isn’t even displayed on the website.
There are bugs opened about displaying available architectures already, at least three in recent weeks:
I don’t think there’s a need for further discussion here. Yes, it’s needed, yes, it’s going to happen.
I’ve thought about the fake EOLed refs idea a bit more. What I like about it is that the error message would be obvious when people on the “wrong” architecture copy-paste commands from some website that is not the Flathub site.
But… Maybe that cure is worse than the disease if it means that commands like “flatpak search” would return them. People who weren’t looking for an app that happens to exist on some other arch would find it anyway. So maybe command line users are on their own. (And with summary files split by architecture, flatpak doesn’t have enough info locally to show a “app doesn’t exist” Vs “app exists but not for you” distinction…)
I guess we should EOL refs of no longer supported architectures (for apps that moved on to newer runtimes). This still keeps the outdated app installable via CLI but search and list no longer contain them.