Does anyone know if Ubuntu Touch supports flatpaks? I’ve been following the project and think what they’re doing is super cool for mobile Linux. I’ve even been thinking about installing it on one of my devices just to try it out at some point.
One problem though. Does it support flatpak? If not, that might be a deal breaker. All the best mobile friendly apps are easily available through flathub. It’s also my preferred way to get them since snap is not as good and natives packages are bound to be outdated given Ubuntu Touch’s current version.
Canonical dropped Ubuntu Touch ages ago. The team running UBPorts doesn’t have any interest in the Snap store the way normal Ubuntu does.
The default store uses Clickable packages, which are like normal packages but with permissions and such. Confinement is based on AppArmor rather than Snap.
UBPorts even has a demo/proof of concept for publishing mobile apps as Flatpak’s on desktop, so they do have an interest in Flatpaks at the very least.
There’s a good reason UB Touch doesn’t use Flatpak, and it’s the same reason iOS and Android don’t use Flatpak: the system wasn’t written to support it. Theoretically it’s possible to combine the right support libraries and add OS level wrappers, but it doesn’t work like that at the moment.