541–550 of 564 posts
Installing any app I want outside the Play Store was the primary reason I decided to go with Android, despite most of the people I know using iPhones. If I can't do this anymore, I may as well switch and be able to use iMessage and FaceTime with them.
Check UbuntuTouch, it's really a nice third option. The OS is refreshing and the dev community active. We do not have to choose the lesser of two evils this time.
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> " I'd say the smart money is on the Unix-derived line of operating systems outliving Windows NT by a considerable amount. " Are you referring to the *BSDs? Linux isn't Unix derived. It's a re-implementation with no code traceable back to the original Unix or any of its descendants. Aside from that, Windows has a revenue stream behind it that looks to continue indefinitely paying for its development and Linux has...…
There are descendants of the Unix source code, and there are descendants of the Unix design. Linux is in the latter group. Linux is the root OS of Android, which has a lot more revenue behind it than Red Hat or Canonical.
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It hasn't been marketed that way, its a term which differentiates installing apps from the app store and installing them outside of it.
I understand what sideloading means, as I'm sure the rest of HN knows. But to the layman non-techie, it has indeed been marketed as a boogeyman. Even in the Android developers blog post: > We’ve seen how malicious actors hide behind anonymity to harm users by impersonating developers and using their brand image to create convincing fake apps. The scale of this threat is significant: our recent analysis found over 50…
If they use the word install apps, they would need to say installing apps from outside of the play store, in which case people are going to automatically try to come up with a different word to associate that with. Any word we come up with is going to be subject to being used for the good and the bad.
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There being a different keyboard with a period next to space that's only used for address bars. Tapback emoji choice being uneditable. There's a lot of little annoyances that on Android can be user-fixed, but on iOS it's just... wait and hope.
Honestly, now you mention it, space bar/period thing is annoying :) I’m always searching for things with unnecessary dots in them, and I’d forgotten about the keyboard options on Android.
We need to stop calling it "sideloading", we should call it freely installing software. The term "sideloading" makes it sound shady and hacky when in reality it is what we have been able to do on our computers since forever. These are not phones, they are computers shaped like phones, computer which we fully bought with our money, and I we shall install what we want on our own computers.
>The term "sideloading" makes it sound shady and hacky "side" refers to the fact that it's not going through the first party app store, and doesn't have any negative connotations beyond that. Maybe if it was called "backloading" you'd have a point, but this whole language thing feels like a kerfuffle over nothing.
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There are descendants of the Unix source code, and there are descendants of the Unix design. Linux is in the latter group. Linux is the root OS of Android, which has a lot more revenue behind it than Red Hat or Canonical.
Android is shaped by Google solely for Google's own monetary gain, just as Windows is by Microsoft. A Google branded dog collar around our necks doesn't seem much better than a Microsoft branded one.
It's no longer a bazzar where random university lecturers write and run entire subsystems between classes, but it is at least multiple companies contributing.
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Thank you for taking your time to list all the options! I have no requirement to use apps other than calls, navigation, something to let me view pdf, take photos and maybe browse HN :) (already a big bunch)
No problem. Honestly, I have this on my mind a lot these days. It feels like I'm being forced out of an apartment and I'm wondering where I'm going to put all my stuff. First I left the iPhone for what I thought was greener pastures on Android and now I'm finding that there's not a lot of great options that don't give Google or Apple complete control. What little trust I still had in Google has basically disappeared.…
Also observing new apps showing up on my phone after Android update without me ever installing them made me so angry that I stopped updating my phone, you know- apps that cannot be removed or disabled.. it constantly makes me wonder what really is running in the background- I don't even have a way to reliably list those things. I'm going to sit through the list you provided and push myself to go through the last mile to actually make the move.