Hacker News Reader

Comment by jc_dc | Hacker News Reader

Tend to agree with all of this. Manifest is way too finicky.

Would be interesting to see how the play store changes in the event of Android honoring code signing for side loading like windows. Eg..no scare screen on side loaded apk’s as long as they’re code signed.

I suspect the App Store would live on as a consumer focused App Store and the enterprise apps would direct distribute which makes sense anyhow cause IAP does t understand account based pricing.

View on HN

Android doesn't do scare screens actually. The only real difference between installing an APK from the play store and an APK you found on the internet is that the application calling the installer has a one time "OK" to make sure you are the one who wants to install an APK; Play Store has this as well, but the default distribution has it turned on, by going in the settings you can fiddle with it and turn it off if you want to.

The only thing actually needed for feature parity with the Play Store is mostly just that F-Droid can't auto-update; the Play Store can skip the update/install prompt screen, F-Droid can't. They added install origins to APK files last year iirc, so there's a likely chance they're allowing it though.

Yeah, still have what equates to a scare screen. Tells you file may be harmful upon download, then you need to change a setting which is streamlined to what it was before, but still a scare screen. Now you can allow from source…but the source isn’t the web address, it’s the initiating application eg. Chrome or Files so there’s a huge security hole with this implementation presumably on purpose to manufacture the incident they need to justify their behavior.

I’ll have to test this tomorrow. Last time I tried sideloading direct from our website I had to flip a switch in settings which came with a scare dialog. If I remember correctly, it was a system wide setting too and didn’t allow for trusting specific sources. If we can self distribute on Android, that will be 3 out of 4.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com