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Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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Sideloading is just a normal term for a specific kind of installing, different than the default method of using the preinstalled store app. Practically nobody actually installs applications on phones from outside those stores. It's a useful and meaningful distinction, and much shorter than saying "installing apps by means other than official stores". You don't "sideload" an app on your PC because that distinction is useless, as it's the default approach anyway.
In fact, the term itself has existed since like the 90s, and has just been adopted for use with smartphones.
for transfering files to your companion devices from a device where you downloaded the files down to.
Installing an APK is not sideloading, as you can download the APK directly on your Android enabled Device. Is your Android Smartphone a companion device?
The guardian project, f-droid, aurora store, etc etc would disagree with your statement that nobody installs outside of the playstore. GrapheneOS, /E/OS etc don't even have playstore as a default store, you choose to install the playstore if you want Google in your life
I didn’t say “nobody”, I said “practically nobody”, and that’s exactly the amount of users of those OSes/stores. Out of ≈7B smartphone users, even being giga-generous, maybe ≈1M use them (realistically, it's a fraction of that). That’s ≈0.014%, about the same ratio of people getting struck by lightning annually, or, you know, practically nobody.
Source for the number of users@ also aurora is a replacement store, google would still call it sideloading to scare users even if the install mechanism is store based
There's no "default" way to install Sherlock Holmes, installing is a "what" not a "how"