On their Android developer blog, Google writes that “sideloading is here to stay” as a response to the recent “Keep Android Open” open letter. But that is with a huge side dose of intelligence insulting hoop jumping. The slides speak for themselves.
It’s not like I don’t understand that Google is simply trying to help save someone from making a big mistake. However, the above verification flow is the equivalent of a company telling you that “you are stupid” without saying it out loud. Yes, it is a one time process. But it is a one time process that IMHO, goes a little too far with the 24 hour wait and verify. The premise is based on the social engineering that scammers do. Guess what, scammers will just social engineer around this process.
I can already see/hear the retorts “that it isn’t that bad since it’s a one time thing and at least is better than Apple’s non-ability to even sideload apps without jailbreaking” while missing the point completely (that walled off garden is a conscious design choice and most customers/even us technically inclined folks have chosen that setup as our primary mobile platform). Here, let me spell it out for those who cannot think critically about this kind of stuff.
The first two steps and information presented + reboot should be more than enough to wake up anyone who may have been sleeping when trying to enable sideloading (even if someone is trying to scam them into enabling it). If the information/prompts are not enough warnings, then that person perhaps deserves to be owned in order to learn a difficult lesson (most normal people learn best from their mistakes and failures). We have this thing called Darwinism… survival of the fittest.
I know that probably comes across as harsh. But these companies continue dumbing down the population by enshittifying workflows and processes where their ulterior motive/objective seems to be to ensure that people cannot think for themselves in the future (the “ChatGPTification” syndrome where it is so obvious now when someones writings are so easy to discern that it wasn’t actually written by them).
Back in 2011, I wrote about the “stupification” of Mac OS X Server (what I had worked on while at Apple a decade prior). Back then, stupification was a term that preceded enshittification to describe something like process decay and decision making that generally made things worse. Google is simply enshittifying/stupifying Android with step 3 (not even Apple and Microsoft enforce that degree of intelligence insulting handholding on their desktop operating systems). It’s offensive as a “solution” when steps 1 and 2 should be more than enough to enable the setting to allow sideloading.
