I am an extremely amateur developer. I wouldn’t have been able to publish an app without the excellent and unpatronising support from the people on Flathub.
There is currently a very positive attitude - your aim is to get more apps published - please don’t lose that! If this seems an odd or negative point, the reason I mention it (at the risk of ranting), is because it is in stark contrast to other application publication technologies (which I won’t name). One appears to be ‘an old boys’ club’ with the aim of keeping out the plebs and their ‘vanity programs’ with patronising attitudes, chaotic documentation and a failure to streamline out-of-date formats. The other has an arcane format with little help from a few ‘gurus’ who in reality don’t appear to know very much. A third one is fine. Whatever you do, please be careful not to turn into a bureaucracy or lose the positive attitudes.
Not being able to include a dependency meant that I had to include the compilation of all its modules in my manifest - a nightmare for someone who doesn’t know C. Would it be possible to have a way to include dependencies, provided they were built on the same platform?
I was unable to find any information about changes to the Gnome platform which had made my previously working app unbuildable. Neither could I find a way to compare it with the Freedesktop platform (which some of it would run on). This information should be available from Flathub if it isn’t from elsewhere.
As I am an amateur, my ideas for growing the community are to do with support and simplicity of development.