It depends what you mean by "apps" and "works". Phone apps have very limited interaction with each other, by design, so that yes, sandboxing works OK. Android also uses sandboxing technologies not available on plain Linux I believe, but I'm not sure of this part. It also has a full system for defining the types of interactions possible between apps, that is built into the UI kit used by all apps, which is another major bonus.
You can't extend most of this to arbitrary Linux packages. Those are often meant to have complex interactions with other packages, and to do so via arbitrary mechanisms (file paths, Unix sockets, shell variables, etc). You can't easily sandbox something like npm or pip, for example, since their whole point is to be globally accessible. Even less so for something like OpenSSL.
You can't extend most of this to arbitrary Linux packages. Those are often meant to have complex interactions with other packages, and to do so via arbitrary mechanisms (file paths, Unix sockets, shell variables, etc). You can't easily sandbox something like npm or pip, for example, since their whole point is to be globally accessible. Even less so for something like OpenSSL.