Canonical is just weird like that, it seems. They tend to pick something and fixate on it really hard (Eg. Unity desktop, Mir, that convergent phone thing, now Snaps) and work on it until it's almost really good, then they get fixated on the next shiny thing and dump whatever they were doing to go chase that instead.

There's a benefit to Canonical, the corp that maintains Ubuntu, which is that while snaps are open source tech, the server for the snap store is closed source and snap can't be configured to point at another store.

In other words, it's about centralized control.

There are some advantages to the tech itself, like live auto-updating, which is good for security-critical server apps, but over all I'm not a fan.

Snaps are used for Ubuntu's IOT distro, and also for their upcoming immutable desktop. They even ship kernel and mesa as snap, which makes updating less likely to break a system (in case of a crash while updating, user error, ...).

That's why they push snap. Canonical doesn't mainly aim to make a apps available to all distros like flatpak does. Just like now where all distros need their own packages, snap will coexist with other package formats.

For the user it's unimportant how apps are installed, as long as they're available.

Because they controll snaps. Their backend is proprietary and they do not support any other way of distribution.

Now there are some objective benefits to Snaps compared to Flatpaks, at least so I was told. Apparently they offer significantly better documentation and integrate more tightly with the system, allowing you to do more stuff with them.

This was a while back tho, I don't know where Flatpak stands today

It could be like the old RPM vs DEB arguments. Technically, one could have argued at the time that RPM was explicitly singled out in the Linux Standard base.

However, these days, DEB certainly feels more common (although, from my understanding, Redhat/Slack is big in enterprise, so i'm not actually sure which is more common).