Ubuntu Ratings and Reviews moving to ODRS

Hi everyone,

Open Desktop Review System (ODRS) is a common review system for Linux desktop apps. It is used by GNOME Software, KDE Discover and others on a wide variety of distros and all the user-submitted reviews are fed back into a single shared database.

Ubuntu has already been using ODRS, via GNOME Software, in 19.04 but back in February we started to update 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish with ODRS too, and you have already submitted a lot of reviews for debs and for snaps, thanks! We will soon be moving 18.04 LTS over to using ODRS as well.

The original Ubuntu Ratings And Reviews service dates back to 2010. The infrastructure providing the service is hard to maintain and a lot of the reviews are for obsolete versions of packages. We intend to carefully shut down the RnR service in the next couple of weeks. ODRS will provide a better, shared database going forwards.

At this point it is not practical to add the additional dependencies needed to build ODRS support in to GNOME Software on 16.04 LTS, and so following the shutdown of the RnR servers it will no longer be possible to read or submit reviews for apps via GNOME Software on 16.04 LTS. Of course, it will continue to allow you to browse, search, install and remove apps from the 16.04 LTS archive and snap store, only that you won’t be able to view or submit reviews.
As more and more applications are packaged as snaps now, you can install the “Snap Store” snap which is based on the latest version of GNOME Software and will give you access to all the snaps in the store and fully supports ODRS reviews. To install it on Xenial type:

$ snap install snap-store

Or click here: https://snapcraft.io/snap-store

You can read more about ODRS and its privacy policy here: https://odrs.gnome.org/

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