I don't know the Apple ecosystem, but adding a 3-second-delay to every opened app because of a questionable sandbox whose security benefits are hypothetical doesn't sounds like “caring about usability” at all…
Appimage is a better solution than snap overall, and it solves your issue with having yo go through canonical, but the whole point of snap is forcing you going through canonical…
But that's exactly like the Apple ecosystem![0]
[0] https://sigpipe.macromates.com/2020/macos-catalina-slow-by-d...
Also Telegram was really buggy a few versions back and it took several releases for notifications to start working again. It would have been nice if I could roll back and pin while they went through the first few 2.0 releases.
It is actively being worked on.
The philosophy they mirror is the "Walled Garden" and "complete control over user devices" though I'm not sure if even Apple is doing the latter. I don't see any practical reason for denying experienced user the choice. Snap may be technologically most advanced software distribution solution (it is not) but it benefits only those who control it, and in case of Snap, that is not you, the user, but Canonical.
Granted, you need to pay for your own separate Snap Store, unless someone makes the effort to create a third-party implementation.
Basically if you have multiple millions of dollars you would be able to distribute your software to probably nobody.
Compare this to making a repo for any platform that allows multiple repos where this is fantastically trivial.
Docker was a complete mess, .net Core was complete hell trying to figure out paths. Certainly stuff not meant for the just-slightly-above dummy, and even less for the actual dummies.
Snaps have been my preferred method of installation for a few years now. I really like how I know where the files are being installed to and if I uninstall the software it will be removed cleanly. I also like how for most software snaps contain the latest release of the software which has not been my experience with distro specific apt repos. I can even install beta, nightly or previous releases very easily using snap store channels. I've never experienced any package manager on any OS that has made it this easy.
I've also developed about a half dozen snaps, some of them were open source contributions to existing software, others were my closed-source projects and one was some contract work for a third party who wanted to snap their existing software for easier distribution. And although there were some pain points, I found the process and YAML based manifest file to be far better than most tools.
My only gripe with snaps at this time is that there is no system like PPAs so if you want to use snaps for your privately distributed app then you need to do it through Canonical and more advanced control features will cost you extra.