Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund puts €509k into hardening Flatpak's sandbox

The German government’s Sovereign Tech Agency is committing €508,640 over two years to Flatpak, the packaging and distribution format that underpins image-based Linux systems like Fedora Silverblue, openSUSE Aeon, SteamOS, and GNOME OS. Coordinated by Modal with Para-Real Ltd. as the supporting organization, the grant funds technical work by a team that includes veterans of the 2023/2024 GNOME STF effort—among them Philip Withnall, Julian Sparber, and Dhanuka Warusadura—and runs through the end of 2027.

The money targets a specific weakness: Flatpak’s sandboxing still lags well behind mobile platforms like Android and iOS. Today an app can’t be granted speaker access without also getting the microphone, and there are no dedicated Portals for networking or VPNs, leaving gaps in how sandboxed apps are isolated from the host. Progress on these platform-level problems had stalled because the work demands niche expertise and the project’s maintainers are stretched thin—a bottleneck the funding is partly meant to relieve by growing the pool of contributors who understand this layer of the stack.

The roadmap centers on new Portals for audio (splitting output from microphone via PipeWire and WirePlumber policy), network scope isolation, a VPN API modeled on Android and iOS, shared spell-checking, and research toward a secure password auto-fill mechanism to replace insecure NativeMessaging. Supporting infrastructure includes an entitlements system so app-store reviewers can verify declared permissions, an intents framework for deep-linking and URL handling, and general maintenance such as porting Portals to libdex and adding integration tests. The plans are described as provisional and may shift as implementation begins.