How did sideloading get its name?
That’s always my trigger, fucking ‘sideloading’. Jesus christ it’s installing shit. Installing. There was never a need for such a pissy horrible concept in the firstplace, a bootlicking special if there ever was one
It’s like “jaywalking”. It purely exists to bully and discriminate against pedestrians and declare the streets belong to the cars. That’s what you get when you have big ass corporations do the lobbying.
Sideloading isn’t a ticket-able offense. It’s just a name for a thing we are all within our rights to do. That’s not really comparable.
Now “jailbreaking” is a term I definitely take issue with as the language straight up makes people question the legality.
Probably because “installing unsigned code from an unknown source” is a mouthful. Installing implicitly means “from within the walled garden” on these devices.
Dude you don’t get to decide what I’m angry about. The term is extremely inaccurate, you don’t sideload shit on your computer, right? It’s yours. I don’t sideload shelves, I put them on my wall. So I’d say the offensive part is that somebody who gets my money gets to decide if I own something.
So this is actually an interesting term. Looking it up from Wikipedia…
The term “sideload” was coined in the late 1990s by online storage service i-drive as an alternative means of transferring and storing computer files virtually instead of physically. In 2000, i-drive applied for a trademark on the term. Rather than initiating a traditional file “download” from a website or FTP site to their computer, a user could perform a “sideload” and have the file transferred directly into their personal storage area on the service.
The advent of portable MP3 players in the late 1990s brought sideloading to the masses, even if the term was not widely adopted. Users would download content to their PCs and sideload it to their players.
So as applied to phones it originally meant a particular type of download and install - rather than installing directly to your phone from an app store, you have somehow obtained the file on your PC, transferred the file to your phone, and then installed it. In that context, downloading an APK directly to your phone and installing it would not be sideloading.
However, semantics have shifted somewhat and now it’s used generally to refer to any install that isn’t directly from an app store of some kind, and requires downloading an actual package file and then installing it.
So it does kind of fit in with the other definitions: download is from the wider internet down to your local device, upload is from your local device up to the wider internet, so sideload is just moving something from somewhere local to somewhere else local. I imagine sideload wasn’t generally used before because we’d just say “copy/install a file” or similar, and its usage now comes from it being a shorthand for the slightly convoluted process required on mobile devices.
It’s from the earlier days of computing/portable devices where almost nothing had the sort of inter-connectivity we take for granted.
You’d download apps or music onto your PC and then ‘sideload’ them onto your PDA or MP3 players.
Sometimes this required both proprietary cables and software. (This is why some of us still get excited by simple USB ports)
