Canonical/Ubuntu has practically stopped innovating for the desktop. There are a few ideas which need a big player, but nobody steps up.
1. Copy update-in-the-background from Chrome OS/Android. If you want to actually improve it, try to provide an undo button (which will never work 100% though). Either use two partitions or disk snapshots for the background system. Do the wake-up-at-night-for-update trick of Android.
2. Turn the snap package system into a real app store. The https://uappexplorer.com/apps is not user friendly. There might even be money in here.
Linux users will not pay for appstore. There is no money to be made here. Just another timesink. You need to first attract significant non-developer users to Ubuntu (which is tied to making better laptops).
Nobody said it would be easy. On the other hand, there is Steam, which is an app store on Ubuntu.
The Ubuntu One store had technical issues and Snap solves at least a few of those if not all. For example, "works only on Ubuntu!" or "what about my dependencies?". It would be hilarious if Redhat users would buy their proprietary software from Canonical.
Still, the main challenge of an app store is not the technical side, but the business stuff: Get a critical mass of apps. It is also the reason why only Canonical or Red Hat could pull this off. It would be quite the hustle. Even Steve Jobs had some fights for the Apple App Store.
Some ideas to put there: Sublime Text, Gitlab EE, CLion, PyCharm, Zend Studio, Gurobi, Spotify, Netflix, TeamViewer, Matlab, Mathematica, SPSS, Stata, Maya, VMWare, Crossover Wine, Guitar Pro, Bricscad, Houdini, etc.
Another problem is the barrier of entry. How to get the customers to open an account? Once the account is open, buying stuff is one click and the 1$ apps will be bought on impulse. Cooperate with Humble Bundle and others for exclusive sales. The usual PR drill.
There are opportunities like App Store for Business. Where the company buys the IDE for all its employees via the app store and handles all the licencing there.
Just a minor point but uappexplorer is a community maintained site which uses the snap store API to present apps in the store. It's open source, hosted on github and I'm sure they'd welcome contributors to help improve the look and feel. https://github.com/bhdouglass/uappexplorer
There's a few other ways to view the snaps in the store though. On the Ubuntu desktop there is snap support in Ubuntu Software, and if you "snap install snapweb" you'll get a pretty web portal on port 4200 on the local machine. This can also be installed on remote machines so you can manage the snaps installed there too.
1. Copy update-in-the-background from Chrome OS/Android. If you want to actually improve it, try to provide an undo button (which will never work 100% though). Either use two partitions or disk snapshots for the background system. Do the wake-up-at-night-for-update trick of Android.
2. Turn the snap package system into a real app store. The https://uappexplorer.com/apps is not user friendly. There might even be money in here.
3. Better hardware support. Hopefully they will use Nexus-of-Ubuntu idea from the AskHN thread. http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2017/04/thank-you-note-to-hac...