Google’s Chromium build system can now produce Flatpak packages, though official support is not guaranteed. The change, implemented by Google’s Tom Anderson, aims to facilitate testing and improve sandboxing configurations.
The Chromium build system now includes the ability to generate Flatpak packages of the browser. This is achieved through added packaging scripts and a build flag, ‘enable_flatpak,’ which is currently disabled by default. When enabled, the builds will skip creating standard symlinks and desktop files, as Flatpak handles these natively. The resulting Flatpak builds will use the app IDs org.chromium.Chromium and com.google.Chrome.
According to Anderson’s commit message, this change is “not a commitment to officially support Flatpak packages.” The primary goal is to “facilitate testing restricted sandboxing configurations” and improve the browser’s XDG portal support. Unofficial Flatpak builds of both Chromium and Google Chrome are already available on Flathub, maintained independently by the community.
Google’s addition of Flatpak tooling to Chromium’s internal build system would allow for easy production of official builds should the company choose to do so. However, the source notes that Google is unlikely to add Chrome to Flathub, citing the same reasons it avoids the Snap Store: the company prefers to control its own update distribution to users and doesn’t want to rely on third-party infrastructure.
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