This page provides a brief timeline of Flatpak's history. It provides information on previous bundling projects and proposal documents.

August 2007 - initial release of Glick, Alex's first application bundling project

November 2011 - release of Glick 2, Alex's second application bundling project

July 2012 - "GNOME OS" session held at GUADEC: a high level discussion of GNOME application developer experience (see minutes). One outcome was a commitment to plan a new application bundling format.

September 2012 - Alex releases experimental "bundler" framework

January 2013 - planning meetings at GNOME Developer Experience hackfest, Brussels

• Discussion of "Linux Apps" proposal
• Concept of Portals first developed
• See Alex's blog post report
• In attendance: Colin Walters, Lennart Poettering, Greg Kroah-Hartman, ...

December 2014 - work begins on xdg-app (first commit was on 2014-12-17)

September 2015 - initial xdg-app release (see GNOME release notes)

March 2016 - first major xdg-app release (see GNOME release notes)

• Full set of tooling and runtimes available for the first time

June 2016 - xdg-app renamed to Flatpak, flatpak.org launched. Accompanying press release includes endorsements by Red Hat, Endless Computers and Collabora.

August 2016

• Endless OS 3.0 released, the first publicly available OS to use Flatpak by default
• Adoption of Flatpak by Apertis IVI becomes public knowledge

October 2016 - Flatpak 0.6.13 released. Introduces major command line improvements, automatic checking and installation for runtimes, capabilities that allow applications that cannot be freely redistributed (like Spotify and Skype) to use Flatpak.

November 2016 - ClearLinux announces their adoption of Flatpak

December 2016 - Flatpak 0.8.0 released. This is the beginning of the first stable release series.

January 2017 - Flatpak docs are made available on readthedocs.io.

March 2017 - At the GTK+ hackfest in London, Flatpak plans are made, the idea of Flathub is being discussed.

June 2017 - A mini-fundraiser yields the necessary funds to start Flathub.

July 2017 - Flathub is up and running!

August 2017 - Flatpak and Flathub planning BOF at GUADEC. Plans for 1.0 are made.

October 2017 - Flatpak 0.10.0 released. This starts the second stable release series, considered LTS.

June 2018

• Flatpak 0.99.1 released. This is the first pre-release leading towards 1.0.
• Flatpak 0.99.2 released.

July 2018

• Flatpak 0.99.3 released.
• Codethink publishes plans for a new stable freedesktop runtime.

August 2018 - Flatpak 1.0.0 released.

September 2018 - Plans for Flathub repo management.

November 2018 - Flatpak 1.1.0 released.