this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2025
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Whole thing is well worth a read, but just from the title alone I was ready to write a long rant about the term 'sideloading'. Gladly that's covered on the text too:
It's really a pet peeve of mine, that term. So typical for what Google/Alphabet is doing to control the narrative around what's "secure" and what isn't.
That's exactly what's going on here. Narrative / concepts are in stake here. By controlling the narrative you can influence or alter the perception of people about things.
I'm just glad people are waking up to how fiercely controlling Google is even in its "free" and "open" source endeavors.
If I browse a piece of software from play store and click 'install' it's "installing" and if I do the very same with F-droid it's suddenly "sideloading". Fundamentally every language is just made up, but on this occasion the newly coined term is used to obfuscate things and attempting to paint things something they are not.
I can claim all day that grass is blue and sky is green, but no one will take me seriously. Same thing should happen with 'sideloading' vs 'installing. Or if you really insist, sideloading might be something like injecting code to a system in a way which is not normally possible, like how some rootkits for devices work. But 'sideloading' is very different from 'installing' and installing anything on a general purpose computer doesn't include any particular tool (like play store). I can install things on my workstation with 'apt-get install' or from source via 'make install', but the end result is still that a piece of software was installed.