"Snaps are containerised software packages that are simple to create and install. They auto-update and are safe to run."
I hate this and I am pretty sure they are not safe to run. Especially if they prompt you for third-party credentials. 🤦
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Snap permissions are generally automatically enabled and the approval process is primarily by Canonical rather than requesting it from the user:
snapcraft.io/docs/permissio
It's also designed in a very coarse and problematic way. Not a good system. Still better than Flatpak though.
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My understanding is that it mostly is decent solving the "self-contained app" problem, but has a broken sandbox model tacked on. If you just provide your own sandbox it should be good.
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It's the failed attempt at providing a privacy/security model that's the problem. It might be better than Snap and other alternatives if you ignore all that. They made it a big part of it though. There are also APIs tied to it. They ported Chromium to using Flatpak sandbox APIs.
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They ended up building things in a way where they end up requiring applications to target their own APIs but a lot of it is designed poorly. It leaks a ton of weird implementation details and a lot is misguided. They're doing a lot of it without looking at iOS, Android, etc.
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I think it's pretty silly to basically work towards spending years of work re-creating the Android 4.4.x sandbox and permission model but without most applications actually using it. Also no one to force apps to do yearly migrations to a stricter sandbox / permission model.
The Android sandbox and permission model is a dead end, built on NSA Linux rather than namespaces.
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Apps should not care about the sandbox model at all. They shouldn't even see it. They just shouldn't see things you didn't explicitly ask to let them see.