Shuttleworth never said “developers prefer snaps”, he didn’t even use the word. He said there is an enormous amount of applications published to the store so developers and users clearly like it. Did you see the actual video?
As to the security element it was about the general story and this matches my experience. I was using obsolete, unmaintained and unpatched versions of Thunderbird for quite some time as per Thunderbird 60 crashes on startup. · Issue #46 · flathub/org.mozilla.Thunderbird · GitHub and Thunderbird still installs cleanly and appears on flathub.org even though it is EOL · Issue #57 · flathub/org.mozilla.Thunderbird · GitHub. Thunderbird carries all my mail accounts and 20 years worth of personal data, and I would argue desktop confinement is worthless if these basics aren’t even covered. And it was nobody’s problem to solve.
When upstream does not accept patches that are otherwise open source and available for distributions, it have always been the distributions that need to solve this when they want to include it, as they also have to do with something like anbox, zfs or even the nvidia driver. How is that relevant wrt the the architecture of the solution? This is just how linux works.
Loads of great news this week, thanks @MichaelTunnell - I think the most exciting has to be the new releases of Ubuntu and KDE Gear, though I’m wondering if Canonical aren’t painting themselves into a bit of a corner with Snaps, like they did with Unity/Mir in the past. I’m sure Snaps are here to stay for server applications, but for ordinary desktop users, flatpak seems to be edging ahead in popularity, or so it seems to me.