Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund to Invest Half a Million Euros in Flatpak

The German Sovereign Tech Agency has named Flatpak as its latest funding recipient. Through its Sovereign Tech Fund, it will invest €508,640 in the development of the application containerization system over the next two years — the work is planned to run through the end of 2027.

The main goal of the investment is to make the platform more secure and to strengthen its isolation mechanisms (sandboxing). The agency had previously supported the GNOME project, which incidentally also helped with some of Flatpak's tasks; now the focus is on a deliberate hardening of the sandbox.

New portals

A significant share of the funds will go toward developing new portals — the interfaces through which isolated applications gain access to system capabilities. The plans include:

• a portal for working with audio via PipeWire;
• network isolation with new features;
• a VPN portal modeled on the APIs from Android and iOS;
• a portal for spell checking and other writing-assistance tools.

The possibility of automatic password filling is being considered separately.

In addition, the initiative will create an “entitlements” system — a mechanism for declaring static permissions for specific portals — as well as “intents” for announcing the services being provided. Some of the work will go toward supporting portals that already exist.

Details about the investment have been published in a blog post on the Modal platform.

Source: Phoronix