Flatpak 1.0 is the first version in a new stable release series. This new 1.x series is the successor to the 0.10.x series, which was first introduced in October 2017.

The following release notes describe the major changes since 0.10.0. For a complete overview of Flatpak, please see docs.flatpak.org.

Flatpak 1.0 marks a significant improvement in performance and reliability, and includes a big collection of bug fixes. 1.0 also includes a collection of new features, including:

• Faster installation and updates.
• Versions of apps can now be marked as end-of-life. App centers and desktops can use this information to warn users and prompt them to update, remove the app or just be aware that support may not be available.
• Built-in permissions now use an up-front verification model: users are asked to confirm app permissions at install time, if an update requires additional permissions, the user must also confirm.
• A new portal allows apps to create sandboxes and restart themselves. This allows applications to restart themselves after they have been updated (to start using the new version).
• flatpak-spawn is a new tool for running host commands (if permissions allow) and creating new sandboxes from a sandbox (this uses the portals APIs).
• Apps can now export D-Bus services for all the D-Bus names they are privileged to own (rather than just the application ID).
• Flatpak's support for OCI bundles has been updated to the latest specification. Also, AppData can now be distributed through OCI repositories.
• Host security certificates are now exposed to app sandboxes, using p11-kit-server. This removes a point of friction when accessing network services in some environments.
• Apps can now access the host SSH agent to securely access remote servers or Git repositories.
• A new application permission can be used to grant access to Bluetooth devices.
• A new fallback-x11 permission grants X11 access, but only if the user is running in a X11 session. For applications that supports both Wayland and X11, this can be used to ensure that the app doesn't have unnecessary X11 access while in Wayland, but still works under X11.
• Peer-to-peer installation (via USB sticks or local network) is now enabled and supported by default in all builds.

The Flatpak command line also introduces new commands and options, including:

• uninstall --unused - automatically removes unused runtimes and extensions (if you've removed all apps that depend on a runtime, or all the apps you had depending on it have upgraded to a newer version).
• New info options, including --show-permissions, --file-access, --show-location, --show-runtime, --show-sdk.
• repair - fixes broken installs by scanning for errors, removing invalid objects and reinstalling anything that's missing.
• permission-* - allows interaction with the portals permissions store. This is useful for testing and for getting back to a clean state.
• create-usb - can be used to prepare an repository to be used as a local updates source.

Finally, the command line has a collection of other improvements, such as:

• If --system or --user aren't specified, one is automatically picked if it is obvious (or it will ask if the correct option isn't obvious).
• The install, update and uninstall commands now ask for confirmation of changes before proceeding, in order to prevent mistakes.
• The uninstall command now does not allow you to remove a runtime if some installed application requires it.
• remove can now be used to uninstall, in addition to the existing uninstall command.

• Flatpak no longer requires a filesystem that supports xattr.
• Portals are now more cleanly separated from Flatpak, thanks to the document portal and permission store having been moved to xdg-desktop-portal. Its recommended that the flatpak package has a weak dependency on xdg-desktop-portal.
• libflatpak now has a transaction API for install, update and uninstall operations. This means that it is much easier to use as the basis of app centers and other graphical app management software.
• Flatpak now sets several HTTP headers when installing applications, which make it easier for Flatpak repositories to log things like app download statistics and Flatpak versions in use.
• It is now recommended that Flatpak packages add a dependency on p11-kit-server, as this allows apps to access host certificates. However, this does not need to be a hard dependency.
• Requires bubblewrap 0.2.1 or later, and comes bundled with 0.3.0.
• Requires OSTree 2018.7.