Every Linux user uninstalled my Chrome extension. My code was fine.
Snap and Flatpak Chromium can’t read files outside your home folder — and the file picker won’t tell you
So I shipped a Chrome extension, an EPUB/FB2 reader. Three weeks in things looked decent: ~250 installs, 75% of people opening books every week. Then I actually looked at uninstalls by OS and went huh.
Linux: 4% of installs, one in five uninstalls. Eleven people installed it. Ten nuked it.
Error logs? Clean. Uninstall survey? Not one Linux user wrote a single word. So whatever it was, it was dying quietly.
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Turns out: Chromium on Ubuntu ships as a Snap, on a bunch of other distros as a Flatpak. Both are sandboxed, and they can only touch files inside your home folder. Someone grabs a book from a second drive, the file picker opens, they pick the file… and nothing. The extension literally can’t read it. From the user’s side that’s “clicked Open, nothing happened.” Thirty seconds later, Remove.
I run Chrome from the .deb, so on my machine it never once broke. Classic works-on-my-machine, just with extra steps.
What I did about it: if a file can’t be read, the extension now says so in plain words and tells you the two ways out (move the book into your home folder, or use regular Chrome). Fine. But the actual fix was five lines: the uninstall URL now carries platform, browser, opened=0|1 and how many days the install lived, and the page behind it logs that before anyone fills in anything. I can finally see the people who leave without saying a word, which, it turns out, is all of them.
Two things I’d yell at past me about: look at uninstalls by OS and language, not the overall rate (16% overall looked totally fine, the Linux row was on fire). And test on Ubuntu with the Snap, because that’s not some weird edge case, it’s the default browser for half of Linux.
Bonus thing: don’t trust the install counter. I got 90 “installs” from Romania in three days, OS “Other”, no browser language, zero of them ever became a user. Bots. Half of r/chrome_extensions is seeing the same batch right now.
The extension is Readkave. It’s free and your books never leave your machine. Link’s in the first comment — this post isn’t about it.
