Comment by ssiddharth
3 months ago
Somewhere along the way, installing became side-loading and the rot started taking hold.
</boomer-rant>
3 months ago
Somewhere along the way, installing became side-loading and the rot started taking hold.
</boomer-rant>
Yeah, this. The vocabulary ratchet is underrated as a policy tool. "Install" became "sideload." "Sideload" became "install from unknown sources." "Unknown sources" is becoming "unverified packages." Each rename shifts the Overton window a little further from "this is the normal way to put software on a computer you own" toward "this is a suspicious deviation Google has graciously decided to tolerate for now."
By the time the technical mechanism lands, the framing has been prepared for a decade. The 24-hour cooldown, the seven taps, the three scare screens all _feel_ proportional to the danger the language has been implying. That's not an accident, that's the policy working as designed.
On the other side of the coin, those of us doing tech support for unsavvy family members do not want them installing software from any source but some vetted app store. Making it a bit harder is a real boon for those of us that still carry the mental scars of so many Bonzi Buddy removals.
Do you consider F-Droid a "vetted app store"?
4 replies →
I've been following "hackery" spaces like the console homebrew and Android custom ROM scenes for almost 2 decades now.
There has long been a culture of deliberately making the installation of certain types of free and libre software needlessly complex and using deviancy-coded language simply because it makes the in-group feel cool and elite.
This whole idea of "sideloading" and related terminology being Google FUD only came about in the past couple of years. For the decade before it was people on xda-developers deliberately throwing words like that around because they wanted to prove they were true 1337 h4xx0rz.
</millenial-rant>