🗣️ This is an open thread. We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts in the comments and vote in the poll below — your take might be featured in a future roundup.
If we were to publish an annual Android Authority Dictionary and issue a word of the year award, chances are “sideloading” would win the 2025 edition. We’ve written extensively about the topic this year due to Google’s increasingly restrictive app installation policies. The company’s controversial developer verification guidelines are set to take effect next year, and concerns are that these new rules will undermine Android’s app ecosystem. To reframe the issue, these rules threaten the concept of sideloading on Android altogether.
Google claims that users will not lose their app freedoms. More specifically, it clarified that “Sideloading is fundamental to Android, and it is not going away.” However, judging by numerous reader comments on our coverage throughout the year and on various online forums, the term “sideloading” appears to be a highly contentious one.
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We’ve seen plenty of pushback on our articles using the term, too. Fundamentally, it describes the process of installing an app that wasn’t sourced from the official app store. We’ve used the term for many years, even before Google’s clampdown on apps on Android, and so have others. A cursory examination of Google Trends reveals the term’s usage as early as 2010. Sideloading has been used in the enthusiast community for more than a decade, and, if anything, it highlights the freedom of user choice and the openness and customizability of Android, rather than something negative.
So, what makes the term so controversial in 2025? Well, that’s the question I want to pose to readers in this open thread.
Given Google’s clampdown on apps on Android, it’s clear that sideloading has been increasingly viewed as corporate speak. Open source app store F-Droid notes that Google’s use of the term itself “insinuate[s] that there is something dark and sinister about the process.” While F-Droid may be correct in a modern context, sideloading wasn’t always the vilified term that it is now.
So, what is your opinion of “sideloading”? Should Android communities continue to use the term, or has it been ruined for enthusiasts by corporations forever? Let’s discuss in the comments.
Here are some more questions: What are your thoughts on the term “sideloading”?
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