Note that the chromium apt package is a transitional package only meant to be used during an upgrade, to migrate existing users. The package is marked as such and the description explains this clearly. Because the package is marked as transitional, it isn't shown in GUIs, it's only installable via the CLI.

The confusion comes mostly from people running the apt command in the CLI without looking at what the package is. There isn't a good way to transition existing users from the deb to the snap during an upgrade without having a transitional package with the same name as the original deb.

Users shouldn't be "transitioned" to a closed-source app store full stop, no matter how nice it would be for Canonical metrics. Only specifically typing `snap install` should work.

If they don't want to continue making auditable builds for this package then that's fine, but they should also stop knowingly making these disguised Snap installation packages which just leverage the package's popularity to increase Snap usage.

> If they don't want to continue making auditable builds for this package then that's fine...

You're mistaken if you think this is what is going on. The build is as auditable as any deb. Here's the source repository:

https://code.launchpad.net/~chromium-team/chromium-browser/+...

...and here are the build logs:

https://launchpad.net/~chromium-team/+snap/chromium-snap-fro...

I found these following links from the store listing: https://snapcraft.io/chromium

Snaps are also used to ship proprietary software - just as proprietary debs also exist. You may not be able to find sources or build logs for those - for example if they are built externally and the binary snap builds uploaded to the store directly. So an individual snap maintainer has a choice on where to build a snap and whether to publish sources and build logs or not. But typically Free Software snaps are built on the same infrastructure as Ubuntu itself, and for these, the sources and build logs are available in an equivalent way.