While that seems sensible, all the Ubuntu flavours ship support for deb and snap only. It’s not possible to ship Flatpaks on the default install. I appreciate you’re a relatively new user here, so may not have been aware of this, but it’s the policy.
People often make these kinds of assertions without data to back them up. So, here’s some data in a handy table:
| Apps | Publishers | |
|---|---|---|
| Snap Store | ~6.8K | ~3441 |
| Flathub | ~3.6K | ~2119 |
There are approximately 3.6K¹ applications in Flathub and 6.8K² snaps in the Snap Store. These numbers are rough because there are multiple Snap Stores and numerous Flatpak repos. But I suspect this roughly balances out.
How many individual developers are working on any given Flatpak or Snap is not apparent. However, if we count the number of unique Snap publisher names, it’s roughly 3441³. Looking at the publishers of Flatpaks to Flathub⁴, there are around 2112.
However, it’s hard to determine the “developer” count because behind every publisher could be one or 1000 developers working on the published project.
That said, in terms of freshness, I am inclined to agree. In my research, the Flathub public mono repo lends itself to community contributors updating Flatpaks. However, as every snap is built from code in random repos, it’s not so straightforward, and you have to rely on the publisher to bang out a new version.
1 - flathub repositories · GitHub
2 - wc -l /var/cache/snapd/names
3 - for snap in $(cat /var/cache/snapd/names); do snap info $snap | grep "^publisher"; done | sort | uniq -c | wc -l
4 - grep "<developer_name>" /var/lib/flatpak/appstream/flathub/x86_64/active/appstream.xml | sort | uniq -c | wc -l