Official support flatpak and the distribution on flathub

[fabiscafe]

Device

PC

Operating System

Linux General

My Question or Issue

Currently Spotifys distribution options are: Snap and general Debian apt-repository.

If you do not run Ubuntu or Debian you have to do a lot of, sometimes strange, actions to make spotify work for you, tbh even the Debian setup is sub-optimal.

That's why, with this topic I suggest to also support flatpak, via flathub as distribution option.

Flatpak will bring an always sandboxed, stable environment, so that the actual user support is pretty minimal and limited to the "flatpak environment", not for example "Arch, Fedora, Gentoo". Flatpak also is available for almost every distro and many do support it out of the box. This is also true for Debian- and many Ubuntu-forks.

The good part

• Sandboxed, stable environment across all distros
• support and even installed by default on a lot of Operating systems
• Could replace the debian package, as debian supports flatpak
• Autoupdates
• Integrated into Cinnamon, KDE Plasma, GNOME Shell, ElementaryOS, SteamOS
• Gain access to Spotify on the SteamDeck
• Already made by the community, so we have stats (>2.5k installs daily)

The bad part

• It requires spotify to support another option or replace one of the current ones
• the sandboxing can bring in downsides, as not working hardware-acceleration, not working filesystem access and so on, if done wrong.

What to do now

Best case would be to talk to the community over on flathub/github, to take over the flatpak manifest, get verified and just update whats already available.

[Beryesa]

Hi, spotify flatpak over flathub has been getting more and more popular, exceeds ~3K installs daily, even hitting 4K from time to time and has been installed over 3 million times.
I remember (the single ;)) Spotify linux engineer @pgomes mentioning it, https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Linux/Wayland-support/m-p/5471363/highlight/true#M21392 I wonder if there's any further motivation.
Even just kindly asking over the repo and verifying the app would be enough, even if it's not fully integrated into the internal CI pipeline, just like how discord did. Looking forward to more community interactions 😉