Sideloading is a term made up by i-drive in the 90s to describe the process of copying a file from someone else’s i-drive to your own. How it ended up becoming the term for installing apps not from a store isn’t clear, but I’d guess it’s because you aren’t “downloading” from a store and more “sideloading” like you might music to an MP3 player (at least in the early days).
Google continuing to restrict the ability to install apps how you want is bullshit, but it’s not like the word sideloading is some nefarious propaganda made up by Big App Store. It’s just slang that evolved beyond its original meaning.
Sidegooning, looking at my own pictures instead of Pornhub
I exclusively masturbate in the mirror maintaining eye contact in order to stick it to the 'hubs of the world.
As an android ROM hacking and foss enthusiast, this meme is dumb as hell.
It’s not called side-loading because it’s not from the play store or whatever. it’s called side loading because the installation is not triggered from within the on-board software.
If you’re using Graphene OS and install software from F-Droid, that’s not sideloading. If you take the Play Store version of an APK and install it via ADB from your PC such that it functions just like it was installed from the store, full authorization included, that IS sideloading.
Don’t take the technical language we’ve been using for decades and reinterpret it to push some agenda in a meme.
Call the situation what it is: taking away product ownership rights.
That distinction is completely valid, but I think it ultimately misses the point of the “sideloading” discussion.
I think no one would disagree that installing apps on mobile devices via ADB (Android) or Xcode (iOS) is sideloading. But if I toggle the “Allow installing from unknown sources” setting on Android and install APKs through F-droid and other means, is that sideloading? You say no, the Wikipedia article about sideloading says yes. That also circumvents security features of the OS to install software. The difference comes down to whether or not a mobile OS provides an easily accessible setting for developer tools that facilitates the installation of software from other sources to the point where it becomes possible to automate it in a store-like fashion. It’s not a hard distinction and more like a continuum of how many hoops a user has to jump through to install and maintain software from other sources.
I think it’s useful to think of the “sideloading” discussion mainly from this user-oriented perspective. The technical distinction of needing versus not needing a separate device is technically valid, but it misses the point IMO.
It’s still just installing software
I’m not sideloading an app onto my desktop when I download an appx file from GitHub to install something instead of using the windows store, having a special term for installing an apk file outside the play store just obscures what’s happening
Exactly. I’m not “sideloading” anything when I use brew on the Mac or when I use docker on Linux.
The term sideloading started being used with the first iPhones, when people used to jailbreak them and “side-loaded” apps.
