Flatsonar
by abutauskas
An F-Droid-style store for open-source Flatpak apps. Yes, it lists itself.
About
Flatsonar hunts down open-source Flatpak apps wherever they live - Flathub, GitHub, GitLab, Codeberg, project-owned remotes, .flatpak bundles attached to releases - and puts them in one store. Every listing credits the original creators and shows a Sponsor button where one exists.
Nothing here is submitted; it is found. Flatsonar re-derives publisher trust and sandbox risk itself instead of taking either on faith, and warns twice before installing anything that asks for broad permissions.
This listing is Flatsonar cataloguing itself, because an app store that hunts down Flatpak apps and happens to be one is exactly the kind of thing it would hunt down. Its own risk score is red: it asks to talk to org.freedesktop.Flatpak, the one permission that lets an app install other apps on your behalf. That is not a bug in the scoring - it is the honest cost of being an app store, and Flatsonar would rather show you that than quietly exempt itself.
- Client: GTK4 + libadwaita, packaged as the .flatpak bundle attached to this listing's release.
- Server: crawls Flathub, GitHub, GitLab and Codeberg for open-source Flatpak apps.
- License: GPL-3.0-or-later.
Permissions
1 permission weaken the sandbox. Flatsonar asks before installing.
- sandbox escape: can run commands on the host via flatpak-spawn
--talk-name=org.freedesktop.Flatpak - inter-process communication (needed for X11)
--share=ipc - network
--share=network - X11 display, only when Wayland is unavailable
--socket=fallback-x11 - Wayland display
--socket=wayland - GPU acceleration
--device=dri - access to ~/.local/share/flatpak
--filesystem=~/.local/share/flatpak:ro - access to xdg-cache/flatsonar
--filesystem=xdg-cache/flatsonar:create - access to xdg-data/flatsonar
--filesystem=xdg-data/flatsonar:create
Who publishes this
The creator demonstrably controls this app id: Flathub verification, the hosting account owns the namespace, or a well-known file on their domain.
- installs a prebuilt binary instead of building from source
source:prebuilt - hosted by github.com/abutauskas, which owns the io.github namespace of io.github.abutauskas.Flatsonar
publisher:namespace
Maintenance
Recent activity on the upstream repository, or built and reviewed by Flathub.
No staleness signals: recent activity, or built and reviewed by Flathub.