AppCenter – the new application center for elementary OS

AppCenter

One of the earliest posts on this blog I asked Daniel Foré about AppCenter and he said it won’t make it to Freya and indeed it didn’t. However it’s going to be present in the next version of elementary OS aka Loki. As Ubuntu is ditching their Software Center in favour of Gnome Software, elementary OS is also looking for a new solution. In fact they were keen to get an own AppCenter before even Ubuntu even had the idea to drop Software Center.

AppCenter for elementary OS
AppCenter for elementary OS

You might wonder why elementary is not going to use Gnome Software. Daniel Foré had a conversation with Richard Huges about this:

Richard: Out of interest, what’s wrong with gnome software? It’s a huge amount of work building a software centre from scratch.

Daniel: We’re still using PackageKit and Appstream so it’s not exactly from scratch. But doing our own client, we get to have it look and act exactly like how we want it. This will become a bigger deal as we try to integrate payments and develop our 3rd party app ecosystem.

Richard: well, my point is that we’re receptive to design input, and it looks very similar to what we have. You could even just build a new shell around the existing plugin loader and get a custom ux and a whole lot of other stuff for free.

Daniel: Thanks! There are just some things about GNOME designed apps that don’t quite jive with elementary designed apps. It’d sit in an uncanny valley. I’m sure that differences will become more apparent as both apps mature 🙂

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