Hello everyone,
Hopefully real soon now tulilirockz is going to PR Bazaar to Flathub and I’d like to share my experiences shipping Bazaar. I fell in love with it the minute I tried it and have been following development, getting to know kolunmi (the lead dev), and starting to grow a little community of flathub enthusiasts.
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This is an entirely new app store built from the ground up for flatpak and only flatpak. No Packagekit, no system updates, no firmware updates, there’s other apps for that - it only does flatpaks. And for permissions we cheat and just open flatseal. Bazaar, Flatseal, and Warehouse end up feeling like a set of apps. Some people think there should be one “do it all”, but IMO it’s way simpler (and cheaper!) to add some integration hooks between the apps to get most of the way there.
Bazaar recently come out of a quiet period while the author (kolunmi) spent some dedicated time reworking the core of the app for efficiency, resource usage, etc. One of the reasons that this app resonated with me was it reminded me just how badass some low level gtk/c stuff can be. It’s so fast. 
It’s great with GNOME, with search integration, and there’s a krunner plugin for the KDE folks. We ship Bazaar to all Universal Blue users, which is about 30,000 weekly devices checking in. Though most people didn’t care, the feedback from passionate KDE users was … interesting. But all of a sudden, people are talking about Discover again. Nice!
Of course, we did it on purpose. And yes Timothée if you’re reading, nice work on Discover recently!! 
Lessons Learned
I am going to concentrate on the GNOME experience since that’s what I dogfood, and I consider it the best experience.
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I truly learned how awful most distribution’s integration of Flathub is. Seeing Fedora continue to struggle with this from a good example. Nothing can compete with zero config Flathub.
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We’re wasting precious resources on the awesomeness of the website AND having to figure out a client UI. SUUUUUUCKS. We should figure out a way to ensure that an app store exists that is more of an extension of the website when in “pure flathub mode”. And with that flatpak protocol thing Bazaar will also be a great companion to the website, PWA users will have a great experience!
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For my GNOME peeps there are some UI things that will poke at your lizard brain - but now that the guts are solid Kolunmi can continue to work with GNOME folks on getting it there. So now would be a good time to expand the user base!
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That brings me to the branding. Because Bazaar was designed to allow for a section of it to be curated by the distributor/end user we can do crazy things:
Note: stock Bazaar doesn’t look like this, look at the stock screenshots on the website if the Brontotherium intimidated you.
And crucially, it let’s us blocklist applications as well. Which is not ideal long term, but some things just give Flathub a bad rap. VSCode being the biggest offender. And other technical reasons, Bazzite comes with Steam on the system image, so if a user accidentally installed Flatpak steam it would cause problems, etc.
This lets us curate the experience for the target audience, and since this is all config driven, people can do what they want, we’re just the first opinionated example.
We don’t list EOL apps, the weights are all adjustable so we could kill a ton of the Flathub quality concerns by filtering on the client side. We should of course talk about long term solutions of quality on the store but we can also adjust thousands of users very quickly and start getting feedback. A good filterset can go a long way. And it never touches your flatpak config so if you want something the CLI experience is untouched, no actual system filtering.
And the big one. Ask anyone who is using Bazaar in GNOME, I am finding SO many new Flathub apps. And I am installing a ton of them and it’s pretty great. This is why Bazaar features download stats and DONATION buttons because ultimately, this is what we’d like to help fix. The crucial point is I think we can prove that users will want a pure Flathub experience, and that UX should be controlled by Flathub. Hopefully a step in that direction. 
Donate!
I cannot tell you how much work Kolunmi and the others have put into this. It’s been inspiring, emotional, all that good open source stuff. If building a sustainable Flathub ecosystem is important to you, please consider donating, we cannot do this without you. Those 30,000 live devices isn’t a bad start. But we need your help. Thanks!
EDIT: Original post said 40k weekly devices, it’s actually a shade under 30k, I suck at arithmetic.