I so far have been disappointed because some of the main things I I shall and had are a browser and password manager and they can’t talk to each other and flatpak refuses to fix it.

This is by design iirc, as a consequence of sandboxing. However there is an easy workaround, which is redirecting your browser profile back to the host with flatpak override/flatseal. I don't need this anymore for Bitwarden but I did this for a long time with Firefox + Enpass.

So is the iPhone and they provided ways to make it work. It’s a use case that is needed so they should be trying to find a (secure) way to do it.

No movement on the associated PR since November?

> some of the apps like VS Code claim to be from microsoft, but are... unofficial?

Unless they have a verified checkmark next to the company/owner of the project it will be a 3rd party package of it. The name is mainly intended as a "This is from X" instead of "This is packaged by X" (unless you actually see the verified badge)

> flatpak is like a cross-distro snap that actually works

You are right. Besides proprietary app store, Snap lacks even basic sandboxing in non-Debian based distros. I can't believe that Canonical engineers thought this was a good idea when designing a cross platform packaging format.

Flatpak got everything right from it's initial design. Multiple repositories, Sandboxing that actually works in any Linux distro, OSTree to reduce disk space usage etc.