• ITGuyLevi@programming.dev
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    1 day ago

    I’ve had the play store install, remove, and modify installed applications without so much as a hint they were doing it, the “Play Store” does what would be considered “sideloading” applications (i. e. a third party app managing your applications from a location other than the package manager), feeding an apk to a package manager would just be “installing” an application like it always has been.

    By co-opting the term to be something bad, they are trying to make it seem like they are the only safe source for applications (even though the Google-managed stores have just as much malware as WinMX did 20+ years ago).

    • dev_null@lemmy.ml
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      20 hours ago

      Correct, but what do you propose? In your terminology installing from the Play Store is “sideloading” and installing directly is “installing”. But surely you agree that if an article was titled “Google makes installing apps on Android harder, but sideloading will be as smooth as before”, everyone would understand the opposite of that.

      • ITGuyLevi@programming.dev
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        18 hours ago

        I would personally like to just go back to calling it installing, but I doubt that is even less likely than getting back “-lications” to my programs (just a dumb joke about how applications slowly became apps).

        Its all good though, I’m just an old man bitching on the internet.

      • biofaust@lemmy.world
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        19 hours ago

        Installing from other app stores. Installing, but not from the Play Store. Installing from not-Google-controlled stores.

        It’s installing. Context can be given using this wonderful semantic device called “subordinate clauses”.

        • dev_null@lemmy.ml
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          16 hours ago

          Yeah exactly, and we reached all the way back to my original comment: you can’t just replace “sideloading” with “installing”, without adding additional clarification.

          • biofaust@lemmy.world
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            11 hours ago

            You never wrote “without additional clarification”, as far as I can read in the parent comments to this one.

            • dev_null@lemmy.ml
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              8 hours ago

              I said in my first comment it would have to be “installing from outside the Play store”, otherwise it wouldn’t have clear meaning.