It's great that there's more investment being put into Flatpak development. The page mentions adding more granular permissions, which is nice to see. However, a

It's great that there's more investment being put into Flatpak development. The page mentions adding more granular permissions, which is nice to see. However, another necessary improvement is actually making it possible for software to incorporate these new granular permissions in a backwards compatible manner. As one example, I maintain a game on Flathub that supports game controllers as an input device. By default, access to game controllers are blocked in the sandbox just like access to any other piece of hardware. The only way to use game controllers is to mark your software as requiring a blanket permission that grants access to all devices connected to the user's system. The Flatpak maintainers realized this is problematic, so a few years ago they added a permission to specifically request access to input devices (https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pull/5481 https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pull/5481). However, because the permissions aren't backwards compatible, and because there's LTS distros under active support with old Flatpak versions released before the permission was added, you aren't allowed to use this permission on Flathub, only the blanket "all devices" permission. As a result, Flathub lists my game as "potentially unsafe" because it "can access hardware devices such as webcams and game controllers" since the only other option was disabling controller support on the Flatpak version of the game. If they figure out a way to implement the new permissions so they can fall back to the broader kind on old Flatpak versions, this would be a massive improvement over the current situation. Otherwise you'll have to wait 10+ years before you can use newly added permissions because the only other option is breaking Flatpak on whatever ancient Ubuntu or RHEL version is still under support.