I'm not too familiar with whatever Android is doing with apks these days tbh. I just don't like how AppImages fails at the one thing it should do (universality) and doesn't have the repo model built in. You can have third party solutions to that but it's just not the same experience.

Why not containerise everything? You need libreoffice? No problem, here is a docker or podman container.

I've heard people suggest such a solution. Everything is a container and stuff is just exported out so that it shows up to the system like a normal program. Can't really say I'm the right person to judge the pros and cons.

There is always another pack installed, freecode, gtk, qt whatever. Even if the system has already the correct gtk version, nope, the dev decided to use the gtk image from Ubuntu.

It can be both good and bad and sometimes it's necessary. The whole system relies on being able to use different versions of libraries. But having them as separate packs can help in that programs can share those packs so as a dev you can just target one common base and have your stuff work everywhere. And sharing those runtimes has the benefit of someone else keeping it up to date while you can just test if the updated version works for you and switch to that if it does and so on. And with deduplication, runtimes and stuff share the parts that are common to both afaik.

It's a bit more complicated than just shoving everything in but also it's less work than same thing having to be packaged separately for every distro.