Headline is a little misleading. There is a one day waiting period when you enable installing third party applications. After that you can install them indefinitely. It’s to stop active scams. I agree it’s BS, but it’s a lot less BS than I was expecting and what the headline/comments are making it out to be.
What active scams? These scams should be pretty ubiquitous at this point if they’re doing all this to “stop” them, but I’ve never even heard of anyone having security issues from sideloaded apps.
I don’t agree that tech companies need to put up walled gardens to protect people from themselves, but ‘what scams’ is insanely disingenuous. Obviously the scams where people, usually elderly, are walked through the process of enabling third party apps so the scammer, posing as a bank or other trusted institution, can then install malicious apps. If you’ve really never heard of that then I think you need to step outside of your bubble a bit more.
Ive heard plenty of examples of elderly people getting conned into buying ITunes gift cards to pay their “delinquent taxes” but I find the thought of trying to explain the process of activating developer mode, navigating to some shady website, downloading an apk, finding the download folder, and then installing some bootleg app to a confused elderly person, over the phone on the very device they want you to do this on to be quite comical. I can’t see many of these people completing even step one of that process.
I’m sure there are malicious apps to sideload out there, but those are also all over the PlayStore too, so I don’t see what this change really fixes.
Headline is a little misleading. There is a one day waiting period when you enable installing third party applications. After that you can install them indefinitely. It’s to stop active scams. I agree it’s BS, but it’s a lot less BS than I was expecting and what the headline/comments are making it out to be.
Okay but what’s stopping the scammer from telling you to install his app from the play store which is less trustworthy than, say, f-droid?
They would never admit to the play store malware problem.
What active scams? These scams should be pretty ubiquitous at this point if they’re doing all this to “stop” them, but I’ve never even heard of anyone having security issues from sideloaded apps.
I don’t agree that tech companies need to put up walled gardens to protect people from themselves, but ‘what scams’ is insanely disingenuous. Obviously the scams where people, usually elderly, are walked through the process of enabling third party apps so the scammer, posing as a bank or other trusted institution, can then install malicious apps. If you’ve really never heard of that then I think you need to step outside of your bubble a bit more.
Ive heard plenty of examples of elderly people getting conned into buying ITunes gift cards to pay their “delinquent taxes” but I find the thought of trying to explain the process of activating developer mode, navigating to some shady website, downloading an apk, finding the download folder, and then installing some bootleg app to a confused elderly person, over the phone on the very device they want you to do this on to be quite comical. I can’t see many of these people completing even step one of that process.
I’m sure there are malicious apps to sideload out there, but those are also all over the PlayStore too, so I don’t see what this change really fixes.
all they have to do now is press a single link to install a scam apk.