[martinmunk]

Are they, technically, any different than APT repositories?

Don't get me wrong. I hate Snap much more than the next guy, but the idea of keeping a repository so you can go look for, and discover, stuff that is supposedly also vetted by someone is nice.

The issue is, when an app store is a monopoly and not standardized.

APT repositories is, in my eyes, an example of "the good" type of app store.

[Tsiklon]

Technically not really, instead of packaging the software into a .deb it’s shipping a container and metadata to get it working.

I think the rub here is that the maintainers of the signal snap can't reuse the work they’ve already put in to this and offer it elsewhere in another snap repository as there’s no other snap repository possible

[tapoxi]

Flatpak solves this problem, unlike Snap (but like APT) anyone can run a repository. There is Flathub as a nice default but it isn't official.

[Octabrain]

I always say that one of the problems in the Canonical's strategy with Snap is not to provide the backend allowing everyone to set their own "store". Then, Canonical would focus in the added value of their one, with things such as a payment processor, malware scanning, ci/cd integration, stats, etc making it appealing.

Flatpak allows this, but, in the other hand, despite I exclusively use Flatpak these days, I dislike the fact that is not focused in CLI apps but desktop ones instead.

[johnisgood]

There is a proprietary piece of software that is released on Snap Store only. They used to release a .deb file. When they did that, it was as easy as extracting the files from the .deb file and run the executable. With Snap, however, it is much more of a hassle to do the same thing. It is possible (at least for the one I have in mind), but yeah, no.