This is really bad. I think that most people on HN will agree with that.
The problem is that most normal people (HN is not normal - mostly for the better) don't even understand what sideloading is - let alone actually care.
How can we fix this?
(aside from making people care - apathy enables so many political problems in the current age, but it's such a huge problem that this definitely isn't going to be the impetus to fix it)
This certainly won't solve the problem, but I would at least like to banish the term "side load", which is a kind of Orwellian word that takes something everyone used to do all the time and makes it sound obscure and a bit nefarious. Maybe we, the tech literate, can start calling sideloading a "free install" or something. When asked, we can clarify that the 'free' stands for both freedom, and not paying middlemen 30%.
I really don't understand this war on language that is so prevalent in tech circles. There's a bunch of these like switching git branches from "master" to "main" or "blacklist"/"whitelist" to "allowlist"/"denylist" and I have yet to see a single problem that all of this term shuffling has actually solved.
If it weren't effective, large businesses and interest ("lobby") groups wouldn't spend millions on trying to establish certain words.
Calling it "sideloading" instead of "installing" software successfully cements the notion that it is somehow not a completely normal thing to do. That's problem solved for the Googles and Apples of the world.
True, but on the other hand the meaning of words often follows usage rather than the other way around.
There is no choice of words that will make it normal to install mobile apps from anywhere other than an app store. Whatever word we use will take on the meaning of doing something unusual.
"Sideloading" doesn't have an inherent or deeply ingrained negative connotation. I don't see a reason to try to change it.
It's usually pushed by people who want to feel "modern" and "proper". It doesn't have any value added, never helped anyone other than people who pushed that.
The curious thing about the word "slave" is that it originates from "slavs" i.e. people living in slavic countries, who were forced to slavery, yet we aren't freaking about that (I'm a slav by myself), it's just a word.
There are societies, however, where words aren't (shouldn't be) treated emotionally, like engineers and scientists. Engineers put priority on ease of communication and clarity. We just do the job, we didn't ask for DEI lectures. You want to be included - show your skills. As simple as that.
Just because it's not conscious and intentional doesn't mean that there isn't still an effect.
It's the way our brains work - the intention doesn't necessarily matter. Next time you're pissed off, try expressing out loud how "darn peeved" you are and watch how much words change how we think and feel
Apples and oranges. Blacklist→allowlist is 2010s social justice virtue signalling thing. Sideloading→installing is about a word that is scary to normies vs a word that's completely normal and neutral.
See the history of words such as "jaywalking" or "carbon footprint" and how their usage cements the respective ideas.
It's not an apples and oranges thing, it's the same practice of changing one term to an another because someone out there chose to believe that these words are somehow so powerful that they're pushing away swaths of people. You have no way of proving that "side loading" somehow scares away people because such proof does not exist.
It’s modern tech sycophancy. Meaningless change that serves no one, but the ones pushing it. They get to say they did something to “fight” some sort of inequality when it’s all just performative. Worse, in the examples you gave, it draws attention away from real issues to fight a culture war that was kind of already won years ago.
This is a great point. Not sure if it’s possible, would be great if there was some way to reclaim the notion of installing software as a general practice, regardless of whether a computer is “mobile” or “desktop”.
Like people still download software packages from the web on Windows, MacOS, and Linux… right? Maybe hard to grasp for the kids that grew up with tablets with no notion of a file system, idk
I think of it as manual installation, since I also have to manually update it. The app stores automatically install and update it (they find the appropriate APK for my device, download it, run the installer, and do the equivalent each time a new version is released).
Direct install isn't true either when you think about package managers like Fdroid, Epic store, etc. They are about as indirect as the official stores. Perhaps you should try 'user loads' for them and something like 'officially blessed loads' for the play and app stores. (I hope the latter is offensive enough to let the users know that it's the corporations in control)
Focusing on "stores" is part of this problem in the first place.
It's one of those seemingly innocent UI and communications changes that causes most users to develop a wrong mental model that obscures what's actually happening.
F-droid isn't actually installing the app. Neither does Play Store or Galaxy Store. Nor does Steam install your games on PC. People think they do, because the store fronts take over informing about installation progress. This little UI change alone - taking over the installer's progress bar - makes people develop bad mental models.
Direct installation is a great term IMHO. That's what you do when you download an APK onto your phone's file system, and then use e.g. file manager app to find that APK file, and run the system's package installer over it.
All F-Droid or Play Store or other stores do is to automate the "find the right APK" and "invoke installation" parts.
I thought that was the default understanding. That's one of the options you have to choose in many installers. For example, an option exists to install the software over ADB from within Android (eg: Shizuku). So, one of the other options you get is "install using system package manager" or something similar. In fact, that was the only method that worked for me until recently.
> When asked, we can clarify that the 'free' stands for both freedom, and not paying middlemen 30%.
Every time you have to clarify, it’s another opportunity to lose the asker. It’s not a good strategy to use a term we have to keep defining or that people may misunderstand. Stallman and the FSF continue to make that mistake and we have had decades to understand that’s a bad approach.
Call it something else, like a “direct install” or something better. You can still have a deeper meaning to it (“direct because it bypasses the App Store middleman”) but make it something people can understand fast. You can’t fight marketing with ideology alone, you have to beat them at their own game.
I'm so used to installing via F-Droid or straight APKs, installing something using the Play store feels weird and hack-y. If anyone's doing the "side loading" I think it's Google :P
People install games from Steam or the Epic Store on their computers without Microsoft preventing that or taking a cut all the time (not for lack of trying. I know). But somehow, in the mobile world, we went with total lockdowns and platform extortion as the rule?
> People install games from Steam or the Epic Store on their computers without Microsoft preventing that
microsoft wishes they could have the level of platform control that google/apple on mobiles have.
It's pure luck that the IBM-compatible PC was not locked down and restricted, because at the time IBM had not thought of it as being important. When it became clear that it was a lost profit opportunity, the cat was already out of the bag and so IBM had no choice.
Microsoft repeated the same "mistake". But apple learnt, and google also from apple.
They tried with the PS/2 MCA architecture, but naturally everyone ignored them.
Nowadays Microsoft could easily do it, they aren't fully into it, because they managed to botch themselves the whole WinRT/UWP and Windows 10X transition, had they made it in a way that most Windows developers would join the party, and the outcome would look much different.
Windows 11 sandboxing already requires MSIX and store distribution to be fully enabled, they only have to slowly keep turning the knobs on Windows 12 in whatever form it shows up, eventually.
That's also because Microsoft has their own game / app store and video game monetization scheme in the form of xbox live, which is integrated into Windows installations.
I don't know if it's actually used much much on windows, but iirc xbox live is pretty popular.
Do you know that Proton is developed as a countermeasure against Microsoft's possibility of vendor locking? It is already anticipated that little or more Microsoft will want that cut.
We're at late stage capitalism, where enshittification occurs at alarming rate.
I agree that this is a horrible step in the wrong direction but in terms of the solution I have a different take.
I don't think that making "normal" people "care" about sideloading is the answer, because a) it's impossible and b) political change doesn't happen through "normal" people anyway, all political and regulatory change is driven via smaller and motivated groups of people.
The problem is fundamentally that there's a duopoly on mobile OSes that has tons of market power and if they want to dictate a change like "you can no longer install unapproved software," they can just do it.
The solution is to walk away from that duopoly, to suck it up and just stop using their products. We fortunately are able to do this (for now) on desktop and running Linux in 2025 is better than it's ever been, and more people are doing it.
To get Linux or some alternative on phones is a big task, and if you make the switch you're going to lose a lot. But most of what has no desktop equivalent is addictive social media garbage that you should get rid of anyway. The biggest thing I'm concerned about is the state of banking and OTP/2FA.
I think we need to fight for universal electronic access to the financial system as a right without a need for gatekeepers like Apple or Google. In some countries it's already the case that at many businesses you must use your phone to make payments, cash is gone, cards are dying, and you must therefore agree to Apple or Google's rules to use your phone. This is truly how freedom and democracy will die if we allow it. This is way bigger for "normal" people than technical concepts like sideloading. People on the left should inherently understand the importance to liberty of having the right as an individual to buy and sell without some megacorp's permission. For people on the right, well, remember the Bible's "Mark of the beast..."
Secondarily we need to fight for the enforcement of anti-trust laws, which half of HN doesn't seem to even know exist, or feels are in some way unfair, even though they are the cause of these problems. Government needs to reach in and rearrange markets that are dominated by one or two players, it needs to forcefully restructure those companies so that they lose their market power and can no longer force citizens to obey their will. We've done it before, such as ending company towns where you were forced to use the company's scrip at the company's shop to buy living essentials. It's worked, we need to do it again.
I can do banking and otp at home with a 100 Euro phone that I use only for that. FB, TikTok, Instagram, etc, neve ever installed them on my devices.
The problem is that I want to make calls, SMSes, use WhatsApp and Telegram, Maps and OSMAnd, NewPipe, VLC, Syncthing and a few others on the phone I carry with me.
And to make matters worse I don't want a huge, thick and heavy brick like every Linux phone I read about. I'm on a Samsung A40 now and it's not easy to find a replacement with similar size and weight.
How are you going to buy things when you leave home?
In the country I live in, which is a highly online and highly mobile first country, a sizeable minority of businesses no longer accept cash. A few no longer even accept cards.
At these businesses, there is only one way to pay, which is to pull out your phone, and initiate a transaction through your mobile banking app, you scan a QR from the vendor and approve the transfer.
Mobile banking is so ubiquitous that often these businesses don't even have signage outlining their payment policies, or it's tiny and hard to find.
Some banks do not have an online banking website, the only way to access your money and make a payment is to use the Android or iOS app on an unrooted device, or physically go to a branch or ATM.
You go somewhere, you buy, at the end of your meal or whatever they tell you phone only, no card, no cash.
It's prevalent enough that being outside of your home without an unrooted Google or Apple operating system physically on your person is a significant impediment to buying basic things, like a meal.
Apple and Google will, through a variety of technical changes, seek to make this the case in all of the world, and in some countries they'll succeed. So the important question now is: how will it go down in the next 10 years in your country? How far under their control is your society going to fall?
Banking, money and payments. Limiting those in the name of security is how they will get you on everything else.
They will take away cash and cards and there will only be payment apps, on approved secure OSes which you can't "tamper" with (aka install "unauthorized" software like VLC or a Youtube alternative on), or else the payments apps stop working.
They will take away SMS OTP and there will only be TOTP, because it's more secure. Then they will replace the OTP with a facial scan, because it's more secure, people were being social engineered into giving someone those numbers over the phone, etc.
This is all in process. They don't even hide it, they just say it's for security. It is already happening in countries that are highly online and highly phone-centric.
> You go somewhere, you buy, at the end of your meal or whatever they tell you phone only, no card, no cash.
Note that this is likely illegal, even though I'm sure it's very common in certain places, and arguing about legal tender laws is not how you want to spend every meal of course.
But, in principle, in most countries at least, businesses and private citizens are obligated to accept the country's currency to discharge debts. They're free to have an upfront no cash policy, and refuse to do business with you if you try to pay with cash, for example making you leave all your groceries at the checkout counter. But if they claim that you have a debt to them, such as a meal you've already eaten and now must pay for, they must accept any form of the country's currency, such as cash, as a means of you paying that debt off.
It's not illegal where I live. Besides, laws can and do change. As an example of one common misconception: I don't live in the US, but there is nothing in the Constitution, nor in federal law, guaranteeing that you have the right to use cash.
That battle will likely come down to the likes of Apple and Google fighting against one state government at a time. Many will fall.
> Each jurisdiction determines what is legal tender, but essentially it is anything which, when offered ("tendered") in payment of a debt, extinguishes the debt. There is no obligation on the creditor to accept the tendered payment, but the act of tendering the payment in legal tender discharges the debt.
The modern banking system is entirely built on the Internet. Every electronic transaction is verified by Internet calls, and in the past Internet outages have made payment in some cases literally impossible.
> I can do banking and otp at home with a 100 Euro phone that I use only for that.
That doesn't solve anything, though. If Google revoked your Google account and refused to open a new one, you'd be SOL - you'd either have to buy an iPhone, or move banks until you find one that gives you a physical TOTP (since many just have apps already, but those apps don't run unless downloaded from the Google or Apple stores).
Telegram's clients are open-source, and there's plenty of non-official ones, but for other proprietary messengers you're SOL.
Hard to believe at this point that these messengers used to use open standard protocols, and you could send messages from Google Talk to Facebook once.
> I don't want a huge, thick and heavy brick like every Linux phone I read about
While I understand your point, are you even going to notice after a couple of weeks of daily driving? Let’s not underestimate our ability to get used to things.
I agree with this take. Desktop Linux is better than ever and I can do just about 100% of what I need on my Linux PC. I still use macOS regularly and even Windows sometimes, but I’m not too worried about Apple or Microsoft locking things down. The more they do, the more I’ll just use Fedora where the same apps I need are available.
The most critical apps for me on mobile are banking, payments, transportation, and messaging. Banking I can’t do much about. Payments I can still handle with physical cards. Messaging is getting better thanks to people adapting proprietary services to Matrix, so with some effort you can use one open source client to reach them all.
Transportation is the area I’ve been working on. I’ve been getting MapLibre (an open source map rendering library) running on Compose Multiplatform, including Compose Desktop (so map apps built in Jetpack Compose could extend to Linux based phones like Librem) and also on Huawei’s HarmonyOS. If I can cover my everyday needs with open tools, then walking away from the Google/Apple duopoly stops being a thought experiment and starts being a real option for me.
I agree with you idealistically, but practically, creating an entirely new mobile OS with market share competitive with the existing two is an unbelievably massive challenge. It'd probably be just about as easy to get people to care about sideloading in the first place.
Remember how Android used to be an open source project and how we had Google backing AOSP? I think it's time we we maintain the latest fork and just use that instead.
That only solves the OS side of things, but doesn't give you a good ecosystem. Unfortunately and increasingly bigger number of apps rely on Google services and attestations, meaning you need a Google approved software to run them.
I wonder if it'll promote having multiple devices, fragmenting into multiple ecosystems. One for the approved walled garden, another for uses that can exist without relying on those services (anything that doesn't need payments?).
Another approach I wonder about is single task specific hardware, like a GPS unit or media player, what tasks have developed over the past ~18 years within the mobile ecosystem and are mature and not rapidly evolving enough that they can be unbundled to their own devices, and desirable enough to stand alone that there's a market for it.
that's highly inconvenient, most people won't bother with that.
The ~1% though will certainly do that, with black market apps and jailbroken OS will rise.
That's not the problem. It's the bootloader locked hardware and the TPM anti-"tampering" security verification that more and more apps require.
It's not just the OS makers. They're also responding to the demand of companies and governments to control their users through them. They will not say "no".
> It's not just the OS makers. They're also responding to the demand of companies and governments to control their users through them. They will not say "no".
I don't believe that entirely. For example, how much safer is a banking app protected by play protect, running on an OEM ROM with tonnes of OEM/Google/Meta malware, compared to the same running on Graphene, Lineage or Calyx? I think it's the other way around. Google or their associates convince either the banking firms, or more likely the security audit companies that the play protect (safetynet or whichever latest flavor) is an absolute necessity for security on android. In the latter case, those security firms will give the developers a checklist to follow, which will include an item on enabling that API. It's unlikely that so many banks will choose them on their own accord like that, even if a bunch of them insist on Google providing it. I have even seen banks disabling the API in their apps through updates. And they also don't have any problems with their web applications that don't have anything similar to remote attestation. Besides if you look closely, it's in Google's interest, not the bank's interest to enable these APIs. Such apps will only run on the OEM ROMs, making the open source and custom ROMs somewhat untenable.
I'm not sure banking firms need any convincing that attestation makes their systems more secure, as it is true. If the only way to interact with the app is via a human interface, that means you can't have scalable fraudulent traffic hitting your services. Without attestation, someone could MITM the app calls, and then automate it away.
Or when you do, you can then link it to specific group of people based on the identifiers you received from the attestation.
Is AOSP no longer a thing? I've been using GrapheneOS for a few years and admittedly lost track of AOSP, I just assumed it was still a thing despite Google generally wanting to control more and more.
Google now only drop through source code after a release, not during development. Also, much AOSP functionality has been moved to Googles Play Services which is closed source.
We used to have strong consumer protection advocates on both sides of the Atlantic, and those consumer protection advocates used to influence laws and regulation which forced corporations to stop doing anti-consumer stuff like this. Those days can return with enough organized labor and solidarity among the working classes.
Yea, but you will need to organize offline because chat control will catch your terrorist messages and report you to the police. And make sure to leave the phone at home so they cant see all the phones meeting in one spot. But how do you go to the location then? Public transport uses the phone for payment, your car uses the phone as authentication / key.
Its a very slippery slope that is very close to being implemented. In a way, we can hope that the current political climate somehow decimates the American corporations that control the systems, but it looks more like IBM during WW2 supplying counting machines to the Americans and to the Germans and everyone else.
The phone platform is officially lost at this point, there is too much political pressure to control it. We are going to increasingly need to rely on sneaker nets, small mesh networks, and home made "illegal" communication devices. The internet will continue to exist, but it is going to fracture more and more with the political wars that are happening at the moment.
I had to do some light research on Wiki, but it looks like Firefox OS was supposed to fill part of this void. Sadly, it was not successful, and the project lost funding and support from Mozilla. I think if Mozilla could not do it, it seems hard to imagine there is an open source org with more talent and money than Mozilla who can make it work.
> I think if Mozilla could not do it, it seems hard to imagine there is an open source org with more talent and money than Mozilla who can make it work.
I don’t believe that at all. Mozilla has been on a string of awful decisions for a long while. They start dumb projects no one asked for or wants all the time and abandon everything swiftly, even the good ones. Look at Rust and Servo.
Firefox OS barely lasted two years between release and discontinuation. It never even stood a chance for most people to even have heard of it or tried it, let alone be successful.
I'm not downvoting you. But the limiting factor probably wasn't the funding at all. It was the competence and marketing. At some level, they had to deal with the hardware stack - which IMO is a very hot mess right now. The only reason why it works for Android is because the OEMs are also in on the game - just like how it was (is?) for the Windows machines.
Sailfish tried and failed. Various Linux distro also tried and failed even harder. Consumers at large just aren't interested in anything other than iOS and Android.
The problem is - linux (outside on server land and maybe SteamOS) is everything but (regular) user friendly.
When people buy a new phone the expect a smooth experience without any major inconveniences and uniform UI. And apps. Lots of apps. Full of features and mature UI. Linux mostly have none of it.
The Linux experience on a decently powerful mobile device (i.e. not those open-source phones that perform like a 2010 smartphone) is perfectly fine. I find the Plasma experience to be a little lacking, but the Ubuntu experience is good when you find a phone UBPorts works on. Phosh (GNOME) works better on mobile than it does on desktop for a lot of things (multitouch touchpads come close to mobile in terms of smoothness).
Consumers didn't pick up Windows Phone or HarmonyOS enough to matter either. Access to the two common app stores is crucial for user adoption even when the UI is good.
Users need a new feature or a new power to justify transition. Learning of new OS is not free. Someone should reuse Android UI, but upgrade the OS to full Linux.
Mimicking the Android UI and UX is very trivial. The hard part is getting the OS to run on the mobile device in the first place. On top a tonne of custom drivers, it also requires way to either get accepted by the OEM locks or a way to bypass it entirely. This is getting harder by the day even with Android custom ROMs.
Valve has managed something similar with SteamOS as well as Proton built on Wine to make Windows games run on Linux, performing as good as or often better than an actual (modern) Windows install.
It's the mobile hardware drivers (such as for the modems and 5g etc) that likely roadblocks - these hardware manufacturers probably have some sort of OEM agreements, and so cannot opensource these drivers for all devices.
I would wish that mobile devices' specs and hardware drivers are all available, so that i am not dependent on the manufacturer supplying a compatible OS.
That will only work as long as Microsoft feels like ignoring it, and they are already starting with something similar to how netbooks were killed in the end.
Valve will learn the OS/2 lesson, by not fostering a proper native Linux ecosystem.
They are doing that with their own games and tooling, look at CS2. But Valve can’t force all other developers and publishers to do the same, they can only show the way, which they do.
There's already open source OSes that run on phones that aren't based on Android.
Off the top of my head there's a Debian based one, a Fedora based one, webOS, PostmarketOS, probably others. Wouldn't be that difficult but yeah, the cost of entry is still probably tens of millions.
Sadly that's not always (or won't be soon) an option. I recently had to buy a new phone so that I could run the 'updated' banking app that requires attestation to run — I was running google free Lineage.
Without attestation, banking apps stop working and without a banking app, you are locked out of modern life in many ways.
This latest Google move makes it impossible to run an attested Android without the sideloading limitation. That means that you'll have to choose between GrapheneOS and using your banking app.
I'm sad to say that I've already had to make that choice :-(. I feel that I was coerced into it.
I'm in the same boat as OP. Used GrapheneOS until Google Pay was enabled in my country. ALL banks then killed their proprietary NFC wallet apps in a month and told users to use Google Pay. I switched to using a Garmin watch for a while.
Then bank apps themselves started giving me warnings that my device was insecure (the irony) and I got increasingly frequent KYC questionnaires coming my way. One of the banks also disabled access to some money transfer services, which I suspect is because of some flag on my account in their system.
I had to ditch GrapheneOS at that point. There are simply no banks that I can switch to.
Exact same thing happened in my country. All the banking apps moved to Google Pay/wallet and there's now only one bank left that supports the AOSP android pay feature. Also using a garmin watch now.
This is also no long term solution. GrapheneOS can't diverge from Google android to much, otherwise modern apps stop working. And Google will definitely go for alternative roms next.
I could've sworn GrapheneOS or LineageOS people were in talks with manufacturers to deliver devices that run one of those OSes out of the box. I wonder if there were any updates on that front
I use GrapheneOS, but it doesn't solve this class of problem. If your {banking|taxi|cash} app doesn't pass Play Integrity API running under GrapheneOS, you are out of luck for those apps. There are different levels of Play Integrity pass, and GrapheneOS does not pass the highest level of them, so some apps may work, and others not. I don't want to use Google Pay, but I couldn't if I wanted to on GrapheneOS, and I've seen people in this thread saying that where they live it can be difficult to pay for something any other way.
Define "normal people".
Due to Chinese phones and sanctions and other geopolitical bullshit a significant part of the world is forced to use alternative app stores already. Yes, these people are very aware of "sideloading". (Due to Google's own previous moronic foot-shooting policy.)
In my case, I've been working on fixing it by doing side work porting apps to offline-first Linux handhelds. With AI it is not hard nor time consuming. You can make personal versions of anything that adds personal value.
The idea that you can hold the beggar bowl out and company mommy will have pity is not realistic. Creating your own ecosystem and cross-fertilising with other liked minded people that is tailored to your approach is far more feasible now than we realise.
> most normal people... don't even understand what sideloading is
Actually, they understand it just fine. The concept is very simple too.
Before this change you could install Android apps without registering your passport/driving license with Google.
After this change you will have to tell Google your real name and home address to install anything on your Android device. This is all. It can take a convoluted form of registering Google account or a more direct form of sending Google your identity documents to confirm "developer privileges". But you will no longer be able to use non-hacked Android devices to install anything without doing those steps.
P.S. I recall that some people still believe that they can create Google account without giving Google your personal details, phone etc. This is simply a self-delusion. If Google does not immediately demand you to cough up a phone numbers under pretense of "suspicious activity", that's because they already know who you are (you probably told them yourself by registering another account elsewhere).
No, "burner SIM cards" aren't real. This is just another form of self-delusion, — this time architected by US security agencies. You don't become anonymous by using those, you become watched.
I don't see anywhere in the official announcement that you will be required to "tell Google your real name and home address to install anything on your Android device". The announcement is about developer verification, not user verification.
You already can not install applications from Google Play without Google account. Google accounts are registered with personal phone number (the one you obtained from your carrier, presumably using your ID). All Google Play users are already "verified" one way or another.
This change means that people who do not use Google Play or other sources, fully controlled by Google, will no longer be able to install applications on Android.
This isn't how I've understood the change. My understanding is that developers will need to have their ID verified before they are authorised to allow their app to be sideloaded. So long as they have done that, why would the user need to have a google account to sideload the app? Wouldn't the whole thing be transparent to the end-user (for those vendors who pass the ID verification) and the only thing they'd notice is that they can no longer install the apps from vendors who haven't passed?
But as you said, the check (and denial) is happening at the time the _user_ is trying to do something _they_ wish to do (e.g. install an APK from a project on GitHub).
Much of the ecosystem of Android apps that are only distributed outside the Play store will be affected by this, as many developers won't be able or willing to submit to this process or waive their privacy (especially young developers or those making apps that are legal but often targeted by litigious companies, e.g. emulators, YouTube clients/downloaders, BitTorrent clients, etc.)
I don't deny that there will be less apps available to sideload. However, the claim I was responding to was this one:
"After this change you will have to tell Google your real name and home address to install anything on your Android device."
As far as I can tell (and nobody who has replied has contradicted me so far), that isn't true. I won't have to tell Google my real name and home address to sideload [the now smaller selection of] apps.
> This is really bad. I think that most people on HN will agree with that.
I may prove to be wrong but I'm looking forward to seeing how this plays out & genuinely think it could be good, holistically.
There's a number of possibilities:
1. This drives most people to Apple & Android dies. iOS is mostly a better product than Android, with the exception that Android is semi-open. This removes Android's only competitive advantage.
2. This drives most people to Apple which motivates Google to do a U-turn.
3. This drives people to Graphene in such large numbers that it gets financial support, & some banks are pressurised into dropping Play Protect requirements.
I honestly don't know which of these 3 is most or least likely but all move us away from the current stagnant position of Google being the best reasonable option of a set of very bad options. A complete Apple monopoly would obviously be bad in the short term but would at least leave an opening for fresh competitors.
You're right of course, most users don't know or care. If they did, iOS wouldn't have a 61% share of the US market.
But the % of the total market that do care is not an insignificant % of the total Android userbase. There's also a spectrum of concern - I'm a long time Android user turned iOS user: I care deeply about sideloading but ultimately the balance of pros & cons shifted for me, & I suspect will begin to for others.
turn people onto sideloaded apps. show them Revanced and NewPipe, show them system-wide ad blockers and bloatware removal and every other thing Google doesn't want plebs to use.
people don't care about "apk side-loading," they care about apps. hook them on forbidden apps, and they'll raise hell when they can't side-load them anymore.
In the EU, you would start a petition to the European Parliament in order to vote on that... Which is a tedious process but has seen some success in some fronts (like the Stop Killing/Destroying Games initiative).
For other countries... Well you get what you vote I guess.
The problem is that most normal people (HN is not normal - mostly for the better) don't even understand what sideloading is - let alone actually care.
How can we fix this?
(aside from making people care - apathy enables so many political problems in the current age, but it's such a huge problem that this definitely isn't going to be the impetus to fix it)