I guess having the app update itself may have some appeal for LTS and enterprise distros, where you cannot get the latest-greatest release from the distro vendo

I guess having the app update itself may have some appeal for LTS and enterprise distros, where you cannot get the latest-greatest release from the distro vendor. On something like Arch Linux, it's pretty pointless and actually counter-productive: By the time, the package lands in the stable channel of the distro, you know that it works well with all your system libraries because someone tested it.