zlacker

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+(OP)
This is a good term, as it avoids the libre/gratis confusion as well.

>>realus+(OP)
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).

>>realus+(OP)
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+5v
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.

>>gblarg+Op
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.

>>TeMPOr+ED
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.