Thank you all for your useful feedback and bug reports from the last situation
report. We (Codethink, James Westman, Kolja Lampe, Bartłomiej Piotrowski, et
al.) have been heartened to see the interest in the work we’re doing. We
continue to be grateful to the GNOME Foundation and Endless Network for
supporting the effort to bring all these new features to flathub.org.
Purchases and Donation support
As we mentioned before, there are a number of legal/tax implications around
donations and purchases as they cross geopolitical boundaries. While work is
ongoing to understand these constraints on how we might be able to operate, we
have been hard at work preparing the backend and core frontend support for
processing transactions. We selected Stripe as our payments partner and have
been integrating their APIs and flows into the codebases.
We’ve been careful to ensure that Flathub retains no sensitive information about
these transactions, instead all of that is deferred to Stripe who have an
excellent set of processes and policies around this. All card transactions etc.
are handled by them, in a flow which embeds into our website.
At this point, we have a happy-path transaction flow fully working with the
backend, and we are working on frontend integration for that. Unfortunately
we’re not ready for https://beta.flathub.org/ to carry that work, though we are
getting much closer.
Verified apps
James’ work on verified application support in the Flathub backend and website
has continued. Developers can now verify their ownership of apps through their
GitHub or GitLab accounts.
Flatpak authenticator app
In addition, James has been hard at work on a Flatpak authenticator, which will
direct you to the flathub.org website to buy or donate to a Flatpak application,
as the core of the support for paid-for Flatpak applications on Flathub. Once
you’ve bought an app, the authenticator will receive a code which it will use to
download the app. This work is going well, and will be integrated into the
purchase flow, as soon as we’ve worked through the legal/tax points mentioned
above.
Cleanups and finishing stuff up
We have, as a group, also been cleaning up and finalising the login support with
the ability to delete users, and the ability to add further login methods to your
account. This has a few outstanding PRs, but it should all be sorted soon, and
then you’ll be able to ensure Flathub knows your Github, GitLab, and/or Google
identities; and later we’ll add KDE and GNOME GitLab login too.
All these identities can be used by James’ work on verified apps to permit you
to claim the Flatpak applications which your logins demonstrate your control
over. This should streamline verification for people whose apps have
io.github, com.github and other similar org name origins.
I18n and L10n
The new frontend is now internationalised, and localisations are already being
produced for it. We have some work to do to integrate the login flow and
payment flows with this, but our hope is that by launch we will have the
frontend properly localised into as many languages as we can. This is being
done with weblate and we welcome
contributions.
Going live
Kolja and Bart are working hard to get to a point that the new frontend can go
live, meaning that the new functionality, translations, style, etc. will be
available for real on https://flathub.org/. It is very important that
if you have any more feedback on the application pages, or other data and
layouts, please provide that feedback to us ASAP. Note: we will not go live with
login support for another few weeks.