Woo, LugRadio is back! 
I’ve noticed there seems to be a lot of bad feeling towards snaps from the Linux community, even from ex-Canonical folks. I was really put off by the centralised snap store too, but listening to this episode makes me think that whilst our instinct is to want a solution without a central point of control, in practice a packaged app platform will always gravitate towards a centralised app store because it’s just way more convenient and secure (as long as you trust the entity which controls it or signs the packages).
That was certainly my experience working on Firefox OS where we set out to build something decentralised, but in using packaged apps ended up with a centralised app store regardless.
The only exception to this phenomenon which really scales seems to be true (progressive) web apps, which are self-hosted by the app developer at an HTTPS URL and executed inside a safe sandbox, rather than being packaged and distributed from a central source. This is what Chrome OS has been able to capitalise on.
Outside of the issue of centralisation (and general anti-Canonical sentiment), it seems a lot of pushback against snaps is about having a cohesive desktop environment. I wonder therefore whether the killer use case for snaps is actually IoT devices running Ubuntu Core and a single application, rather than a disjointed collection of apps in a desktop environment.
In developing IoT products, Ubuntu Core is actually quite a compelling proposition. Free OS level updates for 10 years, and a secure containerised application platform with automatic updates. Having tried to build a snap for Ubuntu Core I can attest to the fact that it’s a real pain the ass (it took me the best part of a year to get something half working, even with the help of Canonical), but I think the basic idea is good. Balena OS does something kind of similar with Docker containers (though I find their business model a bit problematic).
For desktop I really don’t know what the solution is. Web apps provide me with 80% of what I need and the remaining 20% is still kind of a mess. Maybe that remaining 20% can eventually be filled by web apps too.
And no, I don’t think blockchain is the solution either.