Elementary OS ships with it’s own pay what you want AppCenter with over 160 open source software. These are well reviewed and curated by elementary team to ensure a native, privacy respecting and secure experience. The team ensures the Apps listed are not doing anything unethical and adheres the open source community standards.

The Pay-What-You-Want model gives a way for the App users to support developers which in turn motivates them further to improve and better the experience. However, this is on a very small scale since Elementary OS in itself has a small market share compared to Ubuntu/Mint and some other distributions. The developers can always publish their apps in respective App Store but miss out the payment model by Elementary OS.

Team at Elementary OS is now trying to extend its AppCenter to other Linux distributions. They have started a crowd funding which, at the time of writing this article, has reached 60% of its funding! The total target os $10,000 . The elementary idea is to extend AppCenter to other Linux distributions and motivating developers to create more applications which can get donations/payments from Linux users who are happy with the App’s experience.

Elementary OS team is bringing a team together for one week to work on this sprint in person and hence this funding. The team mostly contains the developers who has worked earlier in building the current AppCenter from scratch and people familiar with Flatpak technologies for integrations.

Here’s what the CEO and Founder of Elementary OS, Daniel Fore has to say about AppCenter for everyone.

Elementary OS introduced the support for Flatpak in Elementary OS 5.1 Hera which aimed at providing a self hosted and curated FlatPak repo for AppCenter.

With AppCenter and Flatpak, the team wants to elimiate the need of advance permissiong to download and use an app. The Apps will run as a sandbox and will only have access to your personal information or system’s when explicitly consented.

Flatpak will further ensure cutting edge technology by eliminating the need to depend on the underlying Operating system resources.

Elementary OS team will further work on creating a secure wallet to save your payment methods for a fast and one-click purchasing of an application. This will enable developers to monetize their open source apps on any of the Linux distributions easily and in convenient way.

This certainly will attract a large section of Linux application developers towards the AppCenter. After all, they invest their time and knowledge (and money for the resources) to improve our Linux experience.

I’m pretty excited to see how this model works in future. What do you think about it? Let us know in the comments.