Why Omapak exists.

In May 2026 Flathub decided new apps are banned if AI had anything to do with them. Even one AI-touched commit disqualifies a submission. Their house, their rules... but it's a dumb rule, and I'd rather build the alternative than argue with people who are unwilling to have a fair conversation about it.

Here's what their policy completely ignores: Normal people don't give a shit how something was built if it works well and it fits their needs. A useless app hand-typed by Linus Torvalds himself is still useless. A great app vibe-coded over a weekend is still a great app. Nobody installs a commit history. "Who wrote it" is identity politics for package managers; "what does it do, does it work, is it honest" is all we should care about. If you disagree, I honestly don't care.

Omapak flips it: grade the app on its own merits. We don't care as much about how the sausage got made as we do about what the intent is, and what its state is.

1. It builds and installs. Hard gate. Non-negotiable.
2. It's not hostile to the user. Obfuscated payloads, mystery endpoints, undisclosed telemetry, miner-shaped code: hard pass, pound sand.
3. The packaging isn't a mess. Below 2/5 on packaging hygiene, come back when it installs clean.

Everything else gets scored, published, and never gatekept. If your app is a clone, the report says so and the user decides. Not us. That's the difference between a store and a gatekeeper.

Omapak will be governed in the open: every agent judge report is public, every prompt is public and versioned, every accept or reject comes with written reasons. No overzealous mods denying on a whim, no interrogating developers about their chosen tooling. An agent that we build in the open does the triage against a rubric you can read (and the community guides); a human makes the call. The rubric does the boring work so a small team of maintainers can reasonably run this repo.

To be clear, I'm not anti-Flathub and I'm not anti-human-review. I'm anti gatekeeping, and anti treating "used an LLM" as a character flaw. That said, Omapak is not a slop repo either. That's the whole point. "Built it using AI/agents" and "slop" are different things.

The other rules

• Maintenance. Apps here have to be alive or perma-stable. Quiet or broken past the window (TBD — we'll set it as a community, in the open) and your app gets archived to omapak-unmaintained, still installable, clearly labeled. Quiet after that and it drops from the repo and the servers. Pretending dead software is fine does users no favors.
• Every distro. Born in Omarchy, but it's a standard flatpak repo, so it will do flatpak things. If another repo deplatforms a good app, we'll happily host the continuation.
• Flathub's apps. We don't mirror or proxy them; the catalog links through. If that ever gets blocked, we'll mirror overnight and keep going. Not because I want to, but because your app store shouldn't depend on anyone's permission or opinions.

Let's just support people who want to make things, and do it in the open.

Jon, September 2026