Setting the verified developer tick in GNOME Software

[Allan Day]

Simon McVittie <smcv at collabora.com> wrote:
...
> On Thu, 09 Aug 2018 at 13:04:57 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> > GNOME Software now has the ability[1] to show a little tick when we
> > know the developer providing the Snap is verified and I wondered if we
> > could do something like that for Flatpak.
>
> What does this tick mean?
...
> The Google Play meaning for "verified" seems to be something like "the
> uploading Google account has the name of a well-known company/vendor, and
> we have verified that the company/vendor of that name really controls it"
...

I'm not sure it makes sense to think about verification in a
Flatpak-wide sense: it is probably only relevant to Flathub.

With Flathub, we've historically wanted app developers to be the
publishers, so that they manage the distribution of their own apps. We
already have an informal rule that an app developer has the right to
manage their own app in Flathub, should they want to, and we already
have a basic resolution mechanism for situations where an app
developer wants to take control of an app that's already being
distributed. In this respect, we already have the concept of a
"verified" app. Here "verified" can include someone managing the
Flatpak on the developer's behalf. What matters is that the developer
knows about it, has authorized it, and that Flatpak is to some extent
supported.

This sounds like a different use of the verified badge than what Snap
is using it for, and this could create UI issues if we both tried to
use the same badge: if you're showing these badges in an app center,
they probably ought to mean the same thing, and the UI should probably
have an explanation of what the badge means somewhere.

The wider question we have to answer, I think, is how much we want to
promote the model where app developers manage their own apps. If we do
want to promote it, then showing these badges is probably a good thing
to do, since it's an encouragement to app developers to "own" their
apps.

It's not entirely clear to me whether we need a special mechanism in
order to do this: we already have a developer and a publisher field.
Perhaps we could just show a badge on app tiles when those two fields
are identical?

Allan