Comment by gblargg
3 months ago
I think of it as manual installation, since I also have to manually update it. The app stores automatically install and update it (they find the appropriate APK for my device, download it, run the installer, and do the equivalent each time a new version is released).
This is a software limitation of the device, technically there's nothing preventing the app to auto-update like on Windows.
We could also imagine a mechanism to provide an update URL in the app metadata. The OS could query this URL periodically to check for updates.
So it's still a direct install, it's just that direct install support is limited on phones.