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Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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The guardian project, f-droid, aurora store, etc etc would disagree with your statement that nobody installs outside of the playstore. GrapheneOS, /E/OS etc don't even have playstore as a default store, you choose to install the playstore if you want Google in your life
I didn’t say “nobody”, I said “practically nobody”, and that’s exactly the amount of users of those OSes/stores. Out of ≈7B smartphone users, even being giga-generous, maybe ≈1M use them (realistically, it's a fraction of that). That’s ≈0.014%, about the same ratio of people getting struck by lightning annually, or, you know, practically nobody.
Source for the number of users@ also aurora is a replacement store, google would still call it sideloading to scare users even if the install mechanism is store based