The development team behind Flatpak has unveiled the latest iteration of the universal package manager, which includes a number of enhancements.

One of the biggest improvements comes by way of parental control enhancements. With the latest release, child accounts are now able to update existing applications, by default, when parental controls are enabled. Thanks to this addition, the installation of security and bug fix updates can be installed in a more timely manner.

The release also includes a number of performance and system management improvements, such as the flatpak prune --dry-run command now runs much faster because it skips unnecessary calculations that are related to potential disk space recovery.

Another improvement comes by way of the flatpak permission-reset command. Now, the command will only write entries that have actually changed, to reduce unnecessary file operations. As well, Flatpak applications within systemd now use Flatpak instance IDs instead of top-level process IDs, which helps make Flatpak app management easier.

There are also hardware and compatibility updates, bug fixes, stability improvements, and developer/documentation improvements.

Financially, version 1.16.1 adds an improvement in the way Flatpak apps access USB devices

According to Georges Basile Stavracas, this is “technically still a sandbox hole that should be treated with caution.” The change enables Flatpak apps to limit the scope of USB access only to input devices.

As of now, the latest version has yet to hit standard repositories, but should be added soon. In the meantime, version 1.16.0 is available in the Flatpak Stable PPA.