What storage expense? appimage are actually the smallest thanks to their compression.

I’m saying that Flatpaks use more storage for reliability, and that AppImages are less reliable because they rely on system dependencies in some circumstances.

but usually the issue is that you are missing a lib and not that the app itself is less reliable

This is why AppImages are less reliable. Flatpaks either work for everybody, or they don’t work at all. AppImages might not work if you’re on a “weird distro” or forgot to install something on your system.

And the support channel of yuzu in their discord was full of people having issues with the flatpak that were magically fixed the moment they tried the appimage, due to that issue with mesa being outdated in the flatpak.

Packaging your software with Flatpak does not mean you won’t have issues. But when you do have issues, you know they’ll be an issue for everybody. So when you fix it, you also fix it for everybody.

For example, the RetroArch package was using an old version of the Freedesktop Platform, which comes with an old version of Mesa. When they bumped the version (just changing it from 22.08 to 23.08), the problem was fixed: https://discourse.flathub.org/t/problems-with-mesa-drivers/5574/3