What we talk about when we talk about sideloading

Posted by rom1v 10/28/2025

What we talk about when we talk about sideloading(f-droid.org)

1516 points | 629 commentspage 3

aussieguy1234 10/28/2025|

I've switched my main phone to GrapheneOS, specifically because of what Google is doing here. I'm sure alot of others will do the same.

ge96 10/28/2025||

Tangent about open source development

As a person that tried the Pine64 ecosystem and not being able to will drivers/C++ apps into existence (like I can with web/cross platform), I did not contribute much other than buying the device/doing some videos on YT. (I bought: PP, PPP, PineBook, PineNote, PineTab)

It depended on few people working on it eg. through Discord communities

Anyway point is I saw Expensify I think they have these GitHub PRs which have $ values on them, would be interesting to take that approach, just pay for it literally eg. a GoFundMe for a feature.

ex. https://github.com/Expensify/App/issues/73681

qwertox 10/29/2025||

> Our recent analysis found over 50 times more malware from internet-sideloaded sources than on apps available through Google Play.

Maybe they could make non-Google-Play-Store installed apps become installable only if the device owner toggles a switch which enables doing this risky thing?

Maybe some toggle in the developer options? And make the developer options accessible only if a user taps several times on the Android version label in the settings?

And show a message after every reboot that both of these settings are enabled, as a warning?

PagingDr123 10/29/2025||

My wife runs a clinic with about a dozen health care providers. They use a paging service that delivers pages to a phone app. It has to be a phone app because the shifts are 24hrs and the providers sleep when they can and need to be able to turn off all other notifications.

This costs about $12,000/yr and uses servers in the United States. Some of the staff work very part time, but still need a license at the same cost even if they only get one or two call shifts a month. The price ratchets up regularly.

There is competition, but nothing really better.

I could stand up an asterisk server and write a simple Android and iOS app for an ongoing cost two orders of magnitude lower (using existing infrastructure), but the app store impedance is too high to risk it.

I don't have the practical ability to confidently get an app into the Google play store and the Apple app store and keep it there.

The only viable alternative to bending over for these vendors for us is to go back to discrete pagers. It may come to that.

PagingDr123 10/29/2025|

By the way, the system we used before this was an answering service where an actual human answered the phone and triaged the call.

It was cheaper.

We could go back to that, but no one wants a pager again.

bagol 10/29/2025||

Installing software via Google play store is the actual side loading. You don't install it yourself, Google install it for you.

noisy_boy 10/29/2025|

I wonder if compiling and installing from .tgz source code is sideloading instead installing via apt/dnf.

ekjhgkejhgk 10/28/2025||

What is to be done?

Install LineageOS or GrapheneOS?

I feel that the root problem is that there aren't enough highly skilled low level developers willing to spend their time writing free software for mobile phones. Why do we have Linux and things around it? Because a lot of very skilled developers decided to work on it and offer it to the world.

n3t 10/28/2025|

Most (some sources say ~80%) Linux contributors are paid by their employer.

ekjhgkejhgk 10/29/2025||

I hope that's true. Do you have a source?

n3t 10/29/2025||

"About 80% of kernel contributors are paid – by their employer!" -- https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-linux-is-buil... (from 2025)

Check out "Most active 5.10 employers" table (it's from 2020) on https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/

"Seventy-five percent of all kernel development is done by developers who are being paid for their work" -- https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/press-release/the-linu... (from 2012)

ekjhgkejhgk 10/30/2025||

This is actually a super encouraging thing. I wonder why it doesn't work as well for the Gnu apps.

atoav 10/29/2025||

"Sideloading"? It is called installing where I come from and if you can't install your own software on it you don't own the hardware. The fact alone that they managed to establish "sideloading" as a term tells you 90% of what you need to know in this discourse.

kazinator 10/28/2025||

They wanted to call it freeloading, but showed a bit of self-restraint.

Whenever you side load anything, you are robbing someone's app store of income. You are not visiting their portal to be exposed to ads, you are not seeing ads in the middle of an application, you are not paying for anything.

Or at least, not paying to them. The only streaming service I pay for in my household is Japanese TV, which uses a side-loaded application. I'm freeloading on the Android TV platform because I only paid for the hardware, and for a streaming service not related any Google revenue funnels whatsoever.

That's what it's about.

It's either a derogatory term for "software loading" or an euphemism for "freeloading", or both.

Liftyee 10/29/2025|

I bought the hardware, for the price they chose to sell it at. Why should I be obligated to use any of their services, if I can avoid it?

I'm not sure if your comment is satire. So I'll respond as is.

"Not providing potential further income" is not "robbing"... what is being stolen from them? Something they never had in the first place? When I lose a bet I willingly entered, am I being "robbed" of the gains?

Furthermore, who is losing if I go to F-Droid to install an open source app people wrote with no expectation of income? If Google had a better app, I would have installed it from there. Too bad everything is riddled with ads detracting from the core purpose.

kazinator 10/29/2025||

> I bought the hardware, for the price they chose to sell it at. Why should I be obligated to use any of their services, if I can avoid it?

Their answer would be something like, that the hardware vendor has nothing to do with them and is also a freeloader, taking advantage of their software ecosystem to sell hardware.

j45 10/29/2025||

“Sideloading “ is the original app installing by sync or copying.

You used a wire, or Bluetooth that transferred the app file.

Then it ran.

This is how it was.

iPhone 1 was vehemently against third party apps of any kind.

The use of iTunes to have a “store” helped transfer and install apps digitally, and I believe using a wire too.

You either own your device or you don’t.

At a software level mobile has been a challenge to keep secure and locking it all down might not secure it either as there might be side doors still instead of side loading.

It has been 15-17 years since we got this batch of mobile operating systems, maybe we’re due for a new one since there’s a critical mass of users already on smartphones, unlike when Android/iOS began.

vezycash 10/28/2025|

Everyone developer who worked hard to make windows phone die. Hope you're happy.

Nextgrid 10/28/2025||

> who worked hard to make windows phone die

You mean Microsoft? No backwards-compatibility with Windows Mobile to begin with (so companies can't reuse their existing investment into line-of-business apps on actually nice modern devices either), then they reset the ecosystem 2 times (once during the WP7->WP8 transition, another time during the Windows 10 transition).

actionfromafar 10/28/2025||

Well put. Microsoft following the "Double barrel shotgun, apply one wad per foot." (Reset ecosystem 2 times.)

rcarmo 10/28/2025|||

I was a telco product manager at the time and I can tell you right away that it wasn't developers that killed Windows Phone. This book (https://asokan.org/operation-elop/) tells part of the story, but the telcos I worked for (and competed with) definitely played a big role.

paul_h 10/28/2025||

That book is new to me. I wrote https://paulhammant.com/2013/05/07/android-and-the-art-of-wa... on Google vs MSFT and phones before the book. Mine's a perspective that doesn't mention Nokia or its leadership.

I did own a Treo and loved it up to the OG iPhone - I repaired the eff out of it in the hope that something worthy would come along. I kidded myself I would write apps for it. I'd previously played with Simbian tech (and met a very bitter Simbian team dev in London one "eXtreme Tuesday Club" meetup in 2003). I had a Psion Organizer way back and Palm pilot. I thought Palm's WebOS stood a chance. I still own a Ubuntu Phone that I don't use - single script QML apps would have been the killer, but all that's passed now.

terminalshort 10/28/2025|||

Let's not pretend that MSFT would have been one tiny bit better here.

Andrex 10/28/2025|||

I am, mostly because Windows Phone 7 always did what Google is attempting to do here.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4229029/can-you-install-...

At least we got 10+ years of real sideloading on consumer devices thanks to WP7's death.

sergeykish 10/29/2025|||

Windows RT "sideloading" denied for ordinary users, costly for Line-of-Business apps (2012).

Microsoft UWP only Microsoft Store. Microsoft backtracked their walled garden Windows plans for a while as result of Windows Phone fiasco.

Yes, we are.

efilife 10/28/2025||

I don't understand this sentence. Can someone rephrase?

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