

Contributing to AOSP is already difficult. Now patches wrt stable branch will lead to more conflicts as stable gets older.
Why are parts of Android developed in private? It typically takes more than a year to bring a device to market. And, of course, device manufacturers want to ship the latest software they can. Meanwhile, developers don’t want to constantly track new versions of the platform when writing apps. Both groups experience a tension between shipping products and not wanting to fall behind.
total bs (at https://source.android.com/docs/setup/about/faqs#why-are-parts-of-android-developed-in-private).
Cut the crap. Flatpak uses hardlink from repo where file names are jash of the file itself. The chance of duplication is exactly same as that of duplicate files of same name in same directory.
Flatpak repo grows because we trade uncertainty over abi stability with installing all needed versions of libraries. For abi incompatible builds you could already do that in many distros (versioned soname) but to a lesser extent.
Also I usually do not install nvidia GL with flatpaks that I won’t run on nvidia on hybrid gpu laptops anyway for energy reasons.