[72deluxe]

Isn't this the problem with iOS apps too? They can't share libs or .so between them, which is why each iOS app is colossal for no good reason, eg. Google Sheets 180MB alone, Google Docs also 180MB, YouTube 280MB..... insane sizes for these.

[hoistbypetard]

Similar in character, but it's probably a factor of 10 worse with Flatpak. With your examples on iOS, the bloat is stuff that's common to the google apps but not part of the platform. With flatpak, it includes stuff that is part of the platform but can't be relied on to be the right version.

It would be nice if Apple would let packages signed by the same key share versioned libraries between them, but I suspect relatively few developers would be able to take advantage of that. Maybe only google and microsoft, to a rough order of approximation.