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I think it's better for someone from the Canonical/Snap team to comment on that. I'll ask them to comment.

Snaps are just a package format, an alternative to .deb which puts control of updates in the hands of the upstream. They enable an upstream to deliver a set of stable releases across versions of Ubuntu and other distros. In this case, it means Docker Inc can offer 1.x, 2.x, 3.x of Docker and provide security and feature updates directly.

Thanks for answering. Flatpak is unavailable for Ubuntu official repositories (it has an unofficial ppa) while Snap is only installable on Fedora using a copr.

A new packaging format would have been great time for Linux to converge around the biggest usability+discoverability+ availability problem that the platform has. While developers need to release one binary for osx or Windows...they need to release atleast 4 for different Linux flavors.

Is there any chance that there could be convergence around the new static packaging that everyone is reinventing?

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