Imagine that one of the most prestigious open source software websites starts showing up in top results for "pornhub downloader".
This is actually happening with Flathub, the official web-based app store for Flatpak packages.
Here's a demo I made while risking to spoil my relationship with Google:
And no, I was not particularly looking for a one-handy utility like this 👼
I was using Ahrefs, a SEO tool used for monitoring web rankings, among other things. This is when I noticed that FlatHub was ranking for terms it should not have been.
Not just that, out of the top 10 ranked pages, at least 2 of them are NSFW tag pages.
Shady developer piggybacking on Flathub's reputation
This would have been one innovative, fun way to make more people use open source software only the application that uses these tags is not open source software at all.
There are actually three of these applications, all of which were created by the same developer, called Warlord Software. I am not going to link out to this website out of spite.
If you visit the Flathub page of these applications, nothing seems extra ordinary, just a regular downloader app for Linux.
But when you scroll down to the tag section, this is where you see the root cause of the problem. All three apps are using those NSFW tags.
This is a deliberate act of exploiting the good reputation of Flathub to get more people to dowload these applications before getting them on the paid version. Yes, all these three apps have premium licenses as well.
Before you say that this is all no-issue and there is nothing wrong with offering an app for downloading videos from adult websites, let me tell you that you will find no such tags or words mentioned anywhere on the developer's website:
Here's what's going on...
See, it is nearly impossible for a new website or application to rank for popular but highly competitive keywords like 'xyz downloader'. There are numerous websites and tools that let you download online videos from x number (orn XXX number) of websites.
So this developer created a few downloader apps that have no special features, offered Flatpak versions for Linux users, published them on Flathub and tagged them with the NSFW keywords. With verified tag, the app looks more legit and tempting to download.
It is easy for a highly reputed website like Flathub to rank highly for those terms.
This way, a shrewd developer who would have never been able to get even 100 downloads on his own got more than 250,000 downloads.
There are tons of good downloader applications for Linux. They can also use these keywords, but we only have apps made by a certain developer doing this. This is pure exploitation of the Flathub ecosystem.
Flathub is not to be blamed here
It's not entirely their fault that someone added NSFW words and used it to sell shady properitary apps. Although they should be more careful about such clear exploitation of their web reputation.
Now, it may seem like I am making an issue out of nothing. Perhaps. I actually noticed this a few months ago. I wanted to write about it but then I decided to ignore a 'non-issue'. Few months later, Flathub was still ranking for all kind of this-hub, that-tube, xyz-hamster downloaders, and I could not tolerate it anymore.
Lovely folks at Flatpak/Flathub/Fedora, please take note. My rant ends here.
