According to the recently published Flathub’s 2025 Year in Review, the platform closed 2025 with its strongest year to date, recording more than 435 million total downloads during the year.
This represents a clear step up (+21%) from 360.4 million downloads in 2024, continuing a multi-year growth trend. For context, total annual downloads stood at 322.7 million in 2023, 148.6 million in 2022, 51.3 million in 2021, and just 27.3 million in 2020. Or in simple words, in five years, Flathub’s yearly download volume has increased by more than fifteen times.
The application catalog also continued to expand. By the end of 2025, Flathub hosted well over 2,800 apps, up from 2,803 total apps reported in 2024. This growth follows earlier jumps from 2,300 apps in 2023, 1,768 in 2022, 1,243 in 2021, and 914 in 2020.
Core web browsers and communication tools led the downloads list, with Firefox, Google Chrome, and Discord ranking as the most popular individual applications. Among the games, Sober Play, a Roblox client, topped the download list, while classic titles such as Minecraft and Space Cadet Pinball registered significant installations.
RetroArch and Dolphin Emulator, the gaming emulators, continued to attract large user bases, while game-store frontends like the Steam Launcher and Heroic also ranked among the most downloaded categories.
Geographic insights from the 2025 report indicate that Flathub’s reach extended to 239 countries, with the United States, Germany, and Brazil ranking among the top markets by download count.
Category-level data shows that utility- and system-focused apps experienced the greatest proportional growth in downloads over the year, with Bottles, a Wine prefix manager for running Windows apps on Linux, becoming the most downloaded utility with 1,6M downloads. Graphics, photography, and productivity tools also saw solid annual increases.
Finally, x86_64 systems overwhelmingly dominate, accounting for 98.7 percent of all downloads, or about 432.6 million installs. AArch64 (ARM64) devices represent a much smaller but visible share at 1.3 percent, totaling roughly 5.5 million downloads. The x86 (32-bit) architecture is effectively absent, registering 0% and a negligible number of downloads.
So what do these figures tell us? In short, Flathub, a centralized store for Linux apps using Flatpak packaging format, confirms the continued expansion of the Flatpak ecosystem as the most widely adopted format for distributing distro-agnostic applications. The expectation is that this trend will continue to grow even stronger in 2026.
