Kodi Becomes the First App to be Verified in Flathub (beta)

Kodi application is now verified in the Flathub beta portal as the first Flatpak.

Verification badges are trending now, considering the entire endless Twitter 🐦 tumble.

Last month, I wrote about a recent merge request for the Flathub portal is bringing the verification badge for individual applications. Today looks like the popular free, and open-source home theatre application – Kodi received a verified badge. Here’s how it looks.

Verified badge in Kodi Flatpak package in Flathub (beta)

It’s currently showing on the Flathub beta website, which is mostly a sandbox for the Flatpak applications before it moves to the official production Flathub portal.

How it works

You can verify your Flatpak application in the Flathub portal if you own it and its respective GitLab/GitHub repo. And you control the domain of the Flatpak application id (e.g. org.mozilla.firefox).

It will be a game changer for Linux desktops since Flatpak is the first sandboxing tech to bring this additional step to secure your application installation experience.

As of publishing this, there might be a manual verification process for applications (it should be) for corner cases where you might have built an app but packaged it by someone else.

Furthermore, I have not found any other application in the Flathub beta with the verified badge (with a few minutes of searching) other than Kodi. The frontend code for the badge icon is already merged. However, some backend work is still in progress, including discussing whether the GNOME extensions can also have the verified badge.

So, it would be still a few months, I believe, before the entire Flathub production website gets the updated badges. Moreover, individual developers and organizations must work with the Flathub team for their apps.

BTW, it looks awesome and is a great touch for the end user desktop experience.

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