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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> If they are talking about disabling it system wide vs disabling it for a single application, is this not pretty irresponsible?

It's not a system wide setting, it's an app-specific setting (that is, it's for the app you wish to be able to install other apps.)

Setting it to “allow” for the default browser and leaving it that way is something of an issue, though.

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So in this case Chrome or Firefox? Does not seem any better. In fact, way worse.

I don't think this is how it works, at least not from my past experience with Lineage. A browser isn't an app installer, as when you download an APK from it, the APK is staged through the phone's integrated file manager (aka "Downloads" app), and is treated as having no real source.

As far as I know, real "app installers" are purpose-built programs such as Amazon Appstore and F-Droid.

Hmm, you might be right, but I installed an APK recently (also on Lineage) and it asked me to authorize Firefox, it had the Firefox logo and seemed to suggest that future installs would be authorized. I cancelled it and opened it through the file manager.

Hmm, that might be one of the changes made in Oreo. Weird, I don't think it's a very good change either.

In my experience its only an app-specific setting on Samsung devices. Their phones give you a prompt for disabling the setting "just this one time".

It's app-specific for any phone running Oreo or newer.

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