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XDG Desktop Portal#

XDG Desktop Portal allow Flatpak apps, and other desktop containment frameworks, to interact with the system in a secure and well defined way.

This documentation covers everything you need to know to build apps that use portals, write portal backends for your desktop environment, configure and distribute portals as part of a distribution, as well as basic concepts and common conventions.

The documentation pages target primarily app developers, desktop developers, and system distributors and administrators. The contents may also be relevant to those who have a general interest in portals.

Content Overview#

This documentation is made up of the following sections:

  • Introduction: learn about the goals, terminology, and reasons to use portals on your apps.

  • Common conventions: coding patterns and principles common when app and desktop developers are working with portal APIs.

  • Application API: portal APIs that apps can use to interact with the host system.

  • Portal backends: interfaces and configuration files that desktop developers can implement and install in order to write a portal backend.

  • Background apps monitoring: service that provides information about apps running in background to desktop developers.

XDG Desktop Portal backends are selected and can be configured by using one or more configuration files. Read more about them here.