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Comment by nirui | Hacker News Reader

Excuse me, what exactly is "sideloading"? If I wanted to run third-party code on a system through the means that's supported by the system, then it should be called "running", it's a part of normal operation.

The word "sideload" made it sound like you're smuggle something you shouldn't onto the system. Subtle word tricks like this could sneak poisons into your mind, be watchful.

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You can't make people just stop using a word. The best course of action is to reclaim it. Look at us, we're posting on Hacker News. With a sideloaded browser.

They already did! The word was install. Or as GP noted, run. They're actually even now much more conventional and widely understood uses, and if anything it's Google attempting to swim against the stream and normalize sideload as language for software installation. Theirs is an object lesson, I think, in appropriately registering the objection and pushing us back to normal language.

I keep hearing that here, and people have good reasons why they think of that but to me sideloading always meant having your phone physically next to the device you're pulling an apk from, in other words loading the app from the side.

Yeah, that strikes me as a familiar use also. They seem to be using it to mean not only that but any software installation that doesn't happen via the Play Store, so it's rooted in real history but also conveniently re-appropriated to imply it's veering outside of typically intended use cases.

I always thought of it as coming from side-channel. Which (until I searched just now and was only offered side channel attacks as a result) I generally construed it as a good thing because the system was assumed to be broken. Things like track 2 diplomacy or messaging the CEO/minister because customer service/bureaucracy was broken. You can go in the side door of a business if you own it or belong there, only dis-empowered customers are forced to go in the front.

Side loading was getting something to work because it should when the system hadn't caught up to the fact that it should work.

I am not sideloading anything, I am installing apps from f-droid on my device.

The old Indian word for setting up software was in-sta-lin-it. It was so common, anyone with basic tribal knowledge could gather next to their "Pee See" and execute the code.

You're about two decades late to the complaint party in this context at least. I can find references on google books back in 2006 referencing sideloading.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/CNET_Do_It_Yourself_IPo...

I'm ready to grant that you found an occurrence in the wild but it takes more than that to demonstrate prevalence, conventional usage, or semantic fidelity to originally intended meanings. Also they are appealing to a usage that's practically as old as the paradigm of personal computing itself, so I don't think they're the one that's out of date.

I happen to remember "sideload" as a term of art for some online file locker sites to mean saving it to your cloud drive instead of downloading it to your computer. A cool usage, but it never caught on.

I think nomenclature as it exists in the PC software universe is closest in spirit on all fronts, in describing running software as, well, running software, and describing installing as installing. While a little conspiratorial in tone they're not wrong that "sideload" pushes the impression that controlling what software you run on your phone should be understood as non-default.

This is an instance of an on target usage though relating to the unofficial loading of software onto the device. And in my eyes finding it in a published work by a major publication means it was likely in wider usage in the same context, at the very least it can be an indicator of the start of that particular usage.

I'm using sideloaded Firefox right now!

newspeak FTW!

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