That would be great.
Yes, absolutely! Love Bitwarden and a proper Flatpak build would be great. Very much in support of this!
Official flatpak would be icing on the cake, hope Bitwarden team can take it up.
I created an account here just to vote for this. The appimage is nice, but it can be a paid to deal with whenever there is an update. In cinnamon, it will remove itself from the application menu. I might not have configured it correctly, but everything else works fine.
I also created an account here just to vote for this. Still learning Linux (Mint Cinn) but I understand the value of the flatpak.
Definitely need official support of Flatpaks from Flathub. Flatpaks are the future on Linux.
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Just wanted to add on this ~8 months later—is the Bitwarden Flatpak still unofficially maintained? If so, I’d still like to see it picked up by Bitwarden proper.
Thanks!
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Hey all, I’m Cassidy, Partner Success Engineer at the non-profit Endless OS Foundation, creator of one of many Linux distros that ships Flatpak support out of the box.
I’d love for Bitwarden to be officially distributed via Flathub, and am open to helping make that happen however I can. Flathub just announced that verified apps are coming and in testing, so users can be sure their critical apps are coming from their actual developers. There’s a ton of momentum behind Flathub from across the Linux desktop space, as also shared in that update.
Right now, it looks like the existing unofficial Flatpak involves taking existing compiled binaries and putting all the bits into the right places; essentially, it piggybacks off of the Debian package and wraps it up in a Flatpak to improve sandboxing and make it available on any modern Linux distro. That could certainly continue if the Flatpak was adopted officially, or it could be built from source if that was preferred.
If a community forum is not the best place to talk to folks at Bitwarden about distribution, I’d love to pick this conversation up via email—anyone from Bitwarden can email me at [email protected] and we’ll get it sorted. 
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Thanks Cassidy, I’ll be sure to share with the team! 
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Bitwarden contains so many sensitive information that it would feel way safer to use an officially supported package.
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Since Cassidy’s post above, Flathub has started verifying apps that are managed by their upstream developers. Currently 686 apps are verified. I still hope to see Bitwarden join them.
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Following up here since the Bitwarden account on Mastodon directed folks back to this site. My offer to help out stands—and as @183231bcb mentioned, verified apps are here for Flathub!
Something else of interest that has happened since this post was first opened: Steam Deck launched and is in the hands of millions of people with Flathub out of the box as the app store.
So far, the Bitwarden app has over 700k installs from Flathub.
For full disclosure, here’s how we could move forward:
-
Transfer ownership of the GitHub repository that holds the manifest; this is the glue that takes the existing app Bitwarden already builds and makes it available on Flathub—all in a completely open source and auditable fashion.
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Verify that ownership either with a
.well-known/file at bitwarden.com, or with the GitHub account that has write access to the manifest. -
Keep doing what you’re doing, or move to building the Flatpak from source. But I want to stress that the process of transferring and verifying the app is very painless and requires a tiny amount of one-time work, then zero additional maintenance burden.
Again, I’m happy to help anyone at Bitwarden with the above steps. I personally pay for, use, and love Bitwarden—and I’d love to be able to confidently use it as an app on my desktop as well.
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I disagree to that.
Flatpaks are incredibly easy to update and having a single way to release the app for all Linux distros is way easier than dealing with per-distro packaging, which makes updating much nicer for the developer as well. Also, if Bitwarden themselves takes care of the Flathub version, it will never be out of date, which cannot be said for third-party package maintainers.
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In June of 2021, a post was made requesting that Bitwarden consider taking over maintenance of the Bitwarden Flatpak application. Likely people request this because they don’t want to rely on the unofficial Flatpak when it could in theory be compromised by a malicious contributor (though perhaps the main person who currently maintains it is trustworthy, idk).
Although it is similar to the Snap package that Bitwarden currently maintains, most people tend not to like Snap for multiple reasons, among them being how Snap does not behave correctly on any distro other than Ubuntu and a couple others. Flatpak is a truly cross-distro solution that integrates with the system much more seamlessly than Appimage, and it has seen increasing adoption in popular distros.
Since the original topic has not really been touched since May of 2022, I was just wondering if there were still talks about picking up the Flatpak. For most Flatpaks I tend not to care who packages them, but for something literally designed to store sensitive information, the package being maintained officially brings a lot of comfort.
Thanks!
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In full agreement. Flatpak is far more distro agnostic, and yeah, it would be super nice to have it be official.
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It is sad that there is no flatpak. . Flathub has reached critical mass and the paid app store is coming. Why a company would choose appimage in this day and age, when Flatpak is so advanced and secure, and guaranteed to run everywhere is beyond my imagination. Apple has .dmg, Microsoft has .exe/msi, and Linux has Flatpak for desktop apps.
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I haven’t heard back from them, but they directed us here to vote. I would request this topic be closed in favor of the original, though, as it’s still open and splitting the vote/community attention doesn’t seem to help us. 
Edit: this was posted on a different topic that was merged here, in case you’re wondering why it doesn’t exactly make sense on this page and links back to itself.
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The verified Bitwarden account posted (emphasis mine):
We’d love to hear more about what you’d want from it and to see how much interest the community has in seeing us prioritize this distribution.
So, I’ll start!
My family and friends use a paid Bitwarden org to share things with one another. A few of us have Steam Decks, which come with Flathub as the desktop app store. On my laptop, I use Endless OS. My father-in-law uses Fedora Workstation. My brother-in-law and daughter both use Fedora Silverblue. A few friends use elementary OS. Others use Pop!_OS.
These are all different “distributions,” but they all use Flatpak as their preferred format for apps—and they include Flathub for apps out of the box or as a two-click install. We could go to the Internet and download an AppImage bundle, manually make it executable, let it sit in our Downloads folder, and live with that (or look up manual instructions for each different distro if we want it more integrated), or… we could just use the app store that’s included and install the Bitwarden app that’s there. 
Flatpak is also built on cross-desktop technologies that are standardized across all major Linux distros; FreeDesktop APIs and Portals are what make apps work on Linux without monumental per-distro efforts—things like autostarting, cross-desktop dark style, and even just the app icon showing up in your app launcher are all FreeDesktop specs. These specs are supported and abstracted by app frameworks like GTK, Qt, and Electron. The folks building Ubuntu, GNOME, KDE, Endless OS, Fedora, elementary OS, Red Hat, Flatpak, Flathub, and Snap are all working together on these APIs! So adapting the app in the long term to use things like Portals will not only make the Flatpak work better across desktops, it will make the app work more consistently regardless of how it’s packaged and distributed.
But I stand by my above three points; the first step that would make a huge difference would be transferring ownership of the Flatpak manifest and verifying the app on Flathub. Then we could work together—as a community, over time—on the rest.
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Seconded/thirded/etc…
I’ve always used the Bitwarden flatpak from Flathub without thinking much about whether it was official or not. I would be much more comfortable if I knew that my secret managing program was distributed through the developer. I use a Linux operating system that only distributes applications through Flathub, so a verified flatpak would be awesome. I believe that every Linux distribution is able to use Flathub, so it should theoretically be a no-brainer since distributing on Flathub should allow the Linux edition of Bitwarden to be distributed to most users from a single source!
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I love Bitwarden, and I love Flatpak, so I’d naturally love it if Bitwarden managed its own flatpak on Flathub. Go on, do it. [I’m currently using the AppImage version.]
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