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 It’s also my preferred way to get them since snap is not as good and natives packages are bound to be outdated given Ubuntu Touch’s current version.
Unlike what many people tend to assume, Ubuntu Touch is not just Ubuntu installed on a smartphone. It’s a separate distro built on Ubuntu technology that has since been partly abandoned. It has a special way of sandboxing applications, dealing with drivers, and dealing with UI. It’s not like the mobile versions of distros like Manjaro where you just boot Linux but on a touch screen.
Out of the box, it doesn’t run Flatpak applications, or even normally compiler applications. Neither Snap nor Flatpak seem to be supported by Ubuntu Touch or its built-in package manager. However, you can create a container in which you install nornal Ubuntu software, which you could try to use to get your Flatpak apps running. You’ll need to edit the .desktop files and do a lot of it through the command line, though. I a way, it’s a bit like running Linux apps on Android, in that you can set up a separate little Linux environment if you want. Support is better on UBTouch (you do get stuff like hardware acceleration) but you’ll have to fiddle and set up the environment yourself.
You can probably get the Flatpak daemon running fine. However, the security model on UB Touch is AppArmor-based and the display system still seems to be based on Mir (rather than X11 or Wayland), so I’m not sure if existing GUI apps will even work if you get the permission model working. Worth a shot, but Mir is practically abandoned outside of old Ubuntu desktops and UBTouch.
Thank you. This was the answer I was looking for. It’s sad that the process to get apps running is fairly convoluted. I hope that things will get easier in the future though I have no clue how hard it would be for them to transition to wayland or improve mir for running other app types. I think flatpak would be huge for improving the usability though since it would give them access to all of flathub.