I had been wondering about that too so I looked it up and apparently it's just what discover displays whenever there's an update that doesn't change the version number which is things like rebuilds with a newer compiler. Very confusing wording, I feel like just "update of version [version]" would be less confusing
Yeah, but in the context of flatpak isn't the distribution managed by the developer themselves? Also, in the distro release version case, they usually add something distro specific to differentiate it.
isn't the distribution managed by the developer themselves?
No, most often it's not.
Valve literally just had a fiasco with them not long ago with them falsely marking steam as verified when Valve are not the ones packing the Flatpak.
I'm not sure about specific packages, but in general a packager may not want to increase the upstream version even if they can do it themselves - for example, they may have made some mistake in the packaging process.
Yes, and hence my comment on flatpak which turns out is false (that the upstream developer is usually the distributor/packager too). And the other still applies, distro usually adds a specific tag anyway for their refresh. Like that one time xz on rolling debian was named something x.y.z-really-a.b.c.
I think flatpak packagers should also append the specific tag too if that is the case. Like, x.y.z-flatpak-w where w can be the build release version