Never noticed the patch option before, what is it for exactly.
Thought at first it was something along the lines of a pull request but can only do it to my own plugins so don't really see the point of having an approval cycle on my own plugins or is it just being tested at the moment?

Calytic has been working on implementing Collaborators for plugins, so that you can add other users with permissions to update your plugins and such.

The Patch feature would be for others to submit patches for your plugin, which you can then accept or deny as the maintainer and/or developer of it.

Nice! That's a feature I'll be looking forward to!

Both are essentially there already, should be working for the most part.