zlacker

>>kotaKa+(OP)
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)

>>throw1+oe1
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%.

>>earthi+fh1
I call it "direct install" personally. It's how you are supposed to be able to install programs, directly from the source.

If anything, it's the playstore and appstore which are side channels.

>>realus+Ej1
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)

>>goku12+JO1
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.