You Can Now Package Your Apps as Snaps without Bundling Their Dependencies

Canonical's Olivier Tilloy announced today, November 28, 2016, that with the recent availability of the ubuntu-app-platform snap in the Ubuntu Snappy Store, application developers can now package their apps as Snaps without the need to build all the deps.

This is possible now because the latest ubuntu-app-platform snap build incorporates the standard Qt 5 libraries, the QML (Qt Meta Language) runtime, the Ubuntu UI (User Interface) toolkit, and their dependencies. The Oxide web engine library based on Chromium and related QML bindings is also bundled in the ubuntu-app-platform snap, so the new Snaps should now be significantly smaller.

"This allows app developers to declare a dependency on this snap through the content sharing mechanism, thus reducing dramatically the size of the resulting app snaps," explains the developer. "I went through the exercise with the webbrowser-app snap. T...