On macOS, it's a lot easier to ship highly compatible applications on your own website, that anyone can just download and then run on their Mac. So Apple's App

On macOS, it's a lot easier to ship highly compatible applications on your own website, that anyone can just download and then run on their Mac. So Apple's App Store is competing with that paradigm as well. On Linux, the runtimes apps need vary too much from distro to distro, or even OS install to OS install, for that to be equally viable. So Flatpak here isn't just an alternative distribution model in a commercial sense, but a technical one— it's genuinely more portable than most previous options. A Flatpak-based store also need not be concerned with taking over the world— Flatpak itself supports configurable repositories, so indie developers are totally free to publish their own apps via Flatpak on their own, or perhaps even on their choice of a range of competing Flatpak-based app stores, should such a field arise. The point in the Linux case is not to corral users into using a single source for all their apps, but rather to provide a broadly compatible option, and also to make commercial development of proprietary software for Linux desktops more viable by allowing vendors to target more users with less effort. If a universal Flatpak store for Linux desktops comes to be, it would probably still be fair to call it a success even if most users prefer to get most of our software elsewhere.