If you’ve installed Chromium or Google Chrome as a Flatpak, you’ve installed an unofficial, community-maintained package done independently of the search giant – that could be about to change.
Chromium’s build system is now able to generate Flatpak packages of the browser itself, though its developers caution that the change does not mean official Flatpak support is coming.
A commit made by Google’s Tom Anderson this week adds the necessary packaging scripts and a build flag (enable_flatpak) to produce a .flatpak package rather than a .deb or .rpm, but that flag is off by default (for now).
If enabled, Google’s builds will also skip producing the stuff (symlinks, desktop files, etc) that Flatpak handles natively, and the resulting Flatpak builds get their own app IDs, Chromium to org.chromium.Chromium* and Google Chrome to com.google.Chrome*.
Anderson’s commit message states it is “not a commitment to officially support Flatpak packages”. Rather, the goal is to “facilitate testing restricted sandboxing configurations” and improve the browser’s XDG portal support.
You’ll find unofficial Flatpak builds of Chromium and Google Chrome on Flathub already, both maintained independently of Google and packaged from source code. Those are Flatpaks, but they’re not Flatpaks built by Google on its infrastructure.
This change adds the relevant Flatpak packaging tooling to Chromium’s internal build system so that if – and it remains an if – Google did deign official builds so, it can easily produce them.
But it’s unlikely Google would add Chrome to Flathub officially for the same reasons we don’t find it on the Snap Store: the search giant doesn’t need someone else’s infrastructure to become a bottleneck in how it gets updates out to users.