Canonical · Snap Store

On the Snap Store, the page for a real app and the page for a copy can look almost the same. A user who comes from a search engine asks one question: is this the real app, and is it safe to install? The store already knows the answer, but the page does not show it well. "Verified" is a 12 px icon with its meaning hidden in a tooltip, many users read the community star as "official", and for a snap not updated since 2019 the warning sits about 820 px below the Install button. This matters, because fake crypto wallet snaps have copied real apps and one user lost 9 BTC.

This is a concept I started on my own and worked on alone. I researched Canonical's products, the Snapcraft forum and news about fake snaps, then audited an official, a community and an unmaintained snap. I set three rules: no new visual style, no new data, and the status is always written in words. The answer is one pattern with three states (verified, community and unverified), placed between the app title and the Install button. For risky snaps, the existing caution message moves above the button, and the button changes from green to the default style. The same labels also appear in search results.

The result is before and after screens for three real cases, a proposed Vanilla pattern with clear usage rules, and a compact version for search cards. Everything is built only with Vanilla components and data the store already has. It is a proposal and has not been tested yet, so I also wrote a simple test plan with 5 to 8 users. The data was already there. It only needed the right place and plain words.