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
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).

>>gblarg+sJ1
This is a software limitation of the device, technically there's nothing preventing the app to auto-update like on Windows.

We could also imagine a mechanism to provide an update URL in the app metadata. The OS could query this URL periodically to check for updates.

So it's still a direct install, it's just that direct install support is limited on phones.