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###### AppStream 1.0

# AppStream

## Infrastructure for distro-agnostic software-centers and universal software component metadata

AppStream is a collaborative effort for enhancing the way we interact with the software repositories provided by the distribution by standardizing sets of additional metadata.

AppStream provides the foundation to build software-center applications. It additionally provides specifications for things like a unified software metadata database, screenshot services and various other things needed to create user-friendly application-centers for software distributions.

You can find a C/GLib based reference implementation of the full specification at github.com/ximion/appstream (https://github.com/ximion/appstream) and report bugs about the implementation as well as the specification itself at the issue tracker (https://github.com/ximion/appstream/issues). The project also provides a web form for the simple creation of metainfo XML files for upstream maintainers at freedesktop.org/software/appstream/metainfocreator (https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/metainfocreator/#/).

Author: Matthias Klumpp
Contributors: Michael Vogt, Richard Hughes, and Vincent Untz
Publication Date: 2026-08-12

Copyright © 2012-2026 Matthias Klumpp. This documentation is dual-licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), v1.3 (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.txt) with no invariant sections or later or the CC Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) license (SPDX: CC-BY-SA-4.0 OR GFDL-1.3-or-later).