Comment by glenstein
1 month ago
>No it's not. The term originated far before this debacle, and carries a meaningful distinction than just "installing". Specifically it means installing from a non-first party source
It's amazing how many confidently wrong people are springing up out of the wordwork to present revisionist history about the meaning of "install" like it's ancient wisdom. Pre-mobile computing treated "install" as neutral and primary and had no built in relation to centralized distribution. Sideloading as a term of art originally, in practice came into usage for transferring media to devices, and some cloud file hosts briefly used it to mean load a file to an online drive without downloading it to computer. It's usage was varied, irregular, and not at any threshold of popular acceptance for one meaning or another.
Windows, Dos, Linux, and online self-hosted services had no notion of "sideloading", or at least no usage of that vocabulary and did not use this notion of "install" that is now being retrospectively declared a longstanding historical norm. Even now, that's not a term used in Windows or Linux. Even Apple, who very much in practice utilize this controlled distribution model but even they don't use this sideloading/installing verbal distinction. In Apple's lexicon installing is neutral with respect to where an app comes from.
So it's staggering to see a specific term of art that deviates from historical precedent that only is used in an Android context and only relatively recently in the history of computing be referred to as if its observing a longstanding precedent across all of computing. It's nothing of the sort.
2007 https://xdaforums.com/t/sandisk-announcement.316860/
2009 https://xdaforums.com/t/android-market-updates-on-sideloaded...
2012 https://xdaforums.com/t/app-wifi-band-switcher-switch-betwee...
2014 https://xdaforums.com/t/q-att-htc-one-m8-not-working-explana...
2020 https://xdaforums.com/t/app-mono_-flipfont-custom-ttf-instal...
This is a long standing term of art. If you're ignorant of a big part of the industry, that's on you.
Oops, try taking a second look at your own links! I said "Sideloading as a term of art originally, in practice came into usage for transferring media to devices".
Your first link actually fits the description I gave, yet you're presenting it here as if unacknowledged.
Most of the usages you link to are in the paradigm of rom flashing or physical media data transfer, and don't even have the upshot of implying that "install" means download from preferred distributor, which is critical since that's what this whole thread is about. Hilariously, even your own links contain numerous casual references to "install" to describe the ordinary act of transferring files into the phone outside of the play store. Which is devastating for your point if your point is that sideloading is supposed to be exclusive term for that action, and that "install" has a long-standing and specific usage as meaning "distributed from Play Store."
Scattershot usage from people flashing ROMs or finding workaround hacks for hardware errors don't demonstrate that that vocabulary was as widely understood in the public consciousness as a settled meaning for sideload much less that the term install exclusively refers to downloading from the Play Store. And again importantly for this thread, it actually shows an evolution of the term that predominantly was about workaround hacks and rom flashing, which has now grown to comprehensively mean any installation of an app from outside the Play Store. If anything, that's a demonstration of a neologism.
And as a kid who grew up on Windows computers in the late '90s and early 2000s, it astonishes me that I have to say this but computing existed before 2009, and gives us a history from which we can draw when figuring out the established use of terms.
And again, as I already said, this sideload/install usage is unique to Android, not observed on Windows, Linux or even Apple. Giving me a bunch of links to a form of usage that I already accounted for in my own comment, and not addressing the more important part of my comment about the prevalence of install as a distribution neutral term, disregarding the history of computing prior to Android and outside of Android is an unfortunate misunderstanding of what your links do and don't say in this context.
>Even now, that's not a term used in Windows or Linux.
No, it's existed in windows 10 (and probably windows 8.1) for over a decade.
https://www.ghacks.net/2015/06/13/how-to-enable-developer-mo... (note the date)
>So it's staggering to see a specific term of art that deviates from historical precedent that only is used in an Android context and only relatively recently in the history of computing be referred to as if its observing a longstanding precedent across all of computing. It's nothing of the sort.
None of that refutes anything I said. You're basically arguing "back in the good old days, all installs were not from first party source and there was no distinction", but that doesn't mean no such distinction exists right now. Otherwise it's like arguing "immigration" is some "neologism" because back before the advent of the nation state, people just moved wherever, there wasn't random lines that turned "moving" to "immigration", and the word "immigration" is coined by statists that want to impose their worldview on the populace.
>but that doesn't mean no such distinction exists right now
A distinction only exists if people parrot the verbiage coined by corporations with a business interest in creating artificial moats. They have no obligation to, especially media outlets who have the right (and IMO responsibility) to use accurate vocabulary.