What to do with applications with hard dependency on portals?

[fiftydinar]

There are some apps which have build option to disable support for portals and to use native system features instead, but most GTK4 apps aren't like that.

For example,

Authenticator depends on the camera and screenshot portal for scanning QR codes, either through camera, or through screenshot

• org.freedesktop.portal.Camera
• org.freedesktop.portal.Screenshot

Screenshot portal works with the AppImage on Gnome, but Camera portal doesn't, which works in flatpak.
Using file picker works, although can't see from logs if it uses a portal or not.

https://github.com/fiftydinar/Authenticator-AppImage

Eyedropper AppImage, which I had for testing, screenshot portal works (but only on Gnome and KDE, which is same as upstream), but the global shortcut portal doesn't, which works in flatpak (afaik, upstream, global shortcut portal only works in Gnome and KDE).

Not to mention that older and some other Linux distros and desktop environments don't have built-in portals at all, so functionality tied to that is either degraded partially or in most cases, fully.

Can we maybe have some placeholders, like with xdg-open or bwrap, which would help with issues like those, or there is nothing we can do?

[Samueru-sama]

Yeah I'm not happy with apps that have hard dependency on portals.

I'm not sure if it is possible to ship portals in an appimage, it will most likely require elevated rights to use it.