GoKawiilAnnouncing Sovereign Tech Agency Investment in Flatpak
By Sebastian, Kateryna, and Cade
We are excited to announce a significant investment of €508,640 by the German Sovereign Tech Agency, through its Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) initiative, into the development and stewardship of Flatpak. This two-year initiative, co-organized by Modal and with Para-Real Ltd. as supporting organization, will accelerate the evolution of Flatpak as a secure, sandboxed platform for packaging and distributing Linux desktop software.
Flatpak serves as the primary application distribution method for image-based operating systems including Fedora Silverblue, openSUSE Aeon, SteamOS, and GNOME OS. It is the preferred format for major ecosystems such as GNOME, KDE, and elementary. By expanding Flatpak’s capabilities, this investment will directly improve the security, robustness, and overall user and developer experience of the Free Software desktop ecosystem.
Are We Sandboxed Yet?
Flatpak is a mature project and the best option that exists on GNU/Linux today, but its security and sandboxing features still trail behind those of well-funded proprietary platforms such as Android and iOS. Certain technical limitations persist, such as the inability to separate audio output from microphone access—and several critical areas, including networking and VPNs, still lack dedicated Portals.
Following significant progress made during the 2023/2024 GNOME STF project, development has slowed in recent years, due to the specialized expertise required for this kind of platform-level work and the limited capacity of the overstretched Flatpak maintainers. This hinders the adoption of secure, image-based operating systems that rely exclusively on Flatpak apps.
A Collaborative Effort
For Modal, a robust app sandboxing story is essential to creating a Free Software OS that is competitive with modern mobile platforms. Leveraging our experience co-organizing STF projects for GNOME and systemd, we have partnered with other community members to put together this new initiative to push the ecosystem forward.
The project is led on the technical side by Sebastian and Adrian, with organizational support from Kateryna and Cade. While Para-Real Ltd. serves as the supporting organization, we hope to use this investment to build long-term community capacity by growing the pool of people who know this part of the stack, and putting in place more formal structures for the Flatpak project.
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