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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>The term "sideloading" makes it sound shady and hacky

"side" refers to the fact that it's not going through the first party app store, and doesn't have any negative connotations beyond that. Maybe if it was called "backloading" you'd have a point, but this whole language thing feels like a kerfuffle over nothing.

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I get where you are coming from. However, language like this matters when it comes to legislation. People outside there space will be guided by the sideload language to think it's just "something extra on the side so why should I care?"

Agreed. "Sideloading" has been marketed as a boogeyman opening doors to malware, when in fact malware exists on the play store anyway.

It hasn't been marketed that way, its a term which differentiates installing apps from the app store and installing them outside of it.

I understand what sideloading means, as I'm sure the rest of HN knows. But to the layman non-techie, it has indeed been marketed as a boogeyman.

Even in the Android developers blog post:

> We’ve seen how malicious actors hide behind anonymity to harm users by impersonating developers and using their brand image to create convincing fake apps. The scale of this threat is significant: our recent analysis found over 50 times more malware from internet-sideloaded sources than on apps available through Google Play.

The research paper that shows their methodology for discovering these results AHS not been published by Google, to my knowledge. Just a mere "trust me, bro".

Edit to include link to source: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/08/elevating-...

But even if they used the term installing apps instead of sideload, what other word would they use? If they said "50 times more malware from internet sources than on apps through Play Store" people will still come up with their own wording.

If they use the word install apps, they would need to say installing apps from outside of the play store, in which case people are going to automatically try to come up with a different word to associate that with. Any word we come up with is going to be subject to being used for the good and the bad.

Sounds like "sidestepping" i.e. doing something illegitimately or at least outside the normal path.

Language strongly influences how people perceive things. For example, people shown videos of a car crash estimated higher speeds and falsely remembered seeing broken glass if the crash was described as "smashed" or "collided" rather than "hit" or "contacted"[0].

"Direct installation" sounds neutral to me, but "sideloading" sounds advanced or maybe even sneaky.

[0] https://www.simplypsychology.org/loftus-palmer.html

Why "first party app store"? You mean the play store with that? Why is that necessarily the "first party app store". I mean, for "Google Android" it might be, but not for AOS.

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