My application isn’t showing in the GNOME Software Center!

First, don’t panic, it’s not some big secret agenda, or any kind of Swedish conspiracy. The Fedora AppStream generator ignores your application if:

  • There is no Name or Comment in the desktop file. You need both.
  • There is no application icon, or if the application icon is missing or less than 32×32 in size
  • Your desktop file has NoDisplay=true
  • Your desktop file does not have Type=Application
  • Your application ID or package file name has been blacklisted.
  • Your application is really just a settings panel
  • Your application isn’t available in fedora or fedora-updates for F20

If you see anything in GNOME Software that you think should not be there, let me know and we can review it. Note, for Fedora 21, i.e. not the Fedora release about to happen they’ll be one extra point where we will disqualify applications:

  • Your application does not contain a .appdata.xml file with at least one screenshot.

So that’s 6 months to get your AppData files upstream before we get all strict. Go!

Published by

hughsie

Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management. Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.

4 thoughts on “My application isn’t showing in the GNOME Software Center!”

  1. So … how am I supposed to install commandline applications? Sounds as they can’t be shown and are systematically excluded due the lack of ID provided by desktop-files. Are they completely hidden in gnome-software or are they somehow searchable?

  2. At the KDE SIG, we’ve been considering enabling AppStream support in Apper for a while. So far, the blocker has always been missing AppStream data, so we’re looking at this work with some interest. Unfortunately, using this data is going to be a non-starter if our applications are not going to show up in it, and the requirements you mention are going disqualify most non-GNOME applications, in particular the Comment= and screenshot ones. Unless, that is, somebody goes through all the applications and makes them comply, but who has the resources for that? KDE SIG does not, unfortunately.

    Can we not make this work without Comment= (which is an optional key in the freedesktop.org desktop-entry-spec)? I’d suggest falling back to GenericName=, and if that’s also missing, to the empty string or to Name=. As for the screenshots, I think that 1. applications should be listed even if they’re missing a screenshot and 2. we should put up a site where users can upload screenshots (subject to validation). It’s a lot of work to screenshot all the applications ourselves.

    1. Hey Kevin,

      We need the “Comment” i.e. one line description of the app — if KDE apps provide something by a different name just let me know. The alternative is that KDE apps provide an.appdata.xml file with the line in. At the moment we don’t need screenshots to list the app in the metadata, although we might change them in the future to not show in the GNOME UI.

      A bigger point is we should be pushing upstream application authors to do this work, not the downstream packagers. Then we do have the resources.

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