Thank you so much for clarifying! That is most definitely not as bad as I had feared.
I still feel, though, that having to go ahead and proclaim “I am a developer!” just to enable sideloading is a bit much, as almost certainly the vast majority of sideloaders aren’t developers. Nonetheless, it does keep sideloading as an option, and I do see why, from Google’s perspective, using the already-existing developer mode to gate the feature would be convenient in the short term. Perhaps the announcement should specify this -- I suspect a number of people who read it also noticed the lack of that clarification.
And yes, good point on ADB. That does make this less inconvenient for developers or power users, though doesn’t help non-developers very much.
This is going to hurt legitimate sideloading way more than actually necessary to reduce scams:
- Must enable developer mode -- some apps (e.g., banking apps) will refuse to operate and such when developer mode is on, and so if you depend on such apps, I guess you just can't sideload?
- One-day (day!!!) waiting period to activate (one-time) -- the vast majority of people who need to sideload something will probably not be willing to wait a day, and will thus just not sideload unless they really have no choice for what they need. This kills the pathway for new users to sideload apps that have similar functionality to those on the Play Store.
The rest -- restarting, confirming you aren't being coached, and per-install warnings -- would be just as effective alone to "protect users," but with those prior two points, it's clear that this is just simply intended to make sideloading so inconvenient that many won't bother or can't (dev mode req.).
JetBrains’s default grammar checking plugin[1] is actually built on languagetool[2], a pretty decent grammar checker that also happens to be partly open source and self-hostable[3]. Sadly, they have lately shoved in a few (thankfully optional) crappy LLM-based features (that don’t even work well in the first place) and coated their landing page in endless AI keywords, but their core engine is still more traditional and open-source, and hasn’t really seemed to change in years. You can just run it on your own device and point their browser and editor extensions to it.
The really special thing about Frameworks is that you can quickly buy and replace basically any part, not just the usual RAM and SSD -- case in point, when I managed to damage my FW13's keyboard such that it was no longer usable, I could just... go straight to Framework's website and buy a new one for $40. And, I even had the option of a slightly improved one, that shed the Windows key and lacked the god-awful copilot key.
This approach even allows the manufacturer to correct design flaws after the fact -- and let's face it, there will always be design flaws. For instance, my FW13 originally came with a very weak hinge for the screen. It was perfectly usable for most daily usage and most people probably wouldn't care, but it meant I couldn't hold it up without the screen tilting back. Well, FW corrected this for those customers who really did care by just selling a new hinge for $24, and so $24 + 10 minutes with a screwdriver later, I had a substantially more refined device! (And to clarify -- there was a defective hinge version in the early batches, and those were replaced free of charge. Mine was a slightly later version that, beyond lacking the level of stiffness I preferred, was not defective.)
I still feel, though, that having to go ahead and proclaim “I am a developer!” just to enable sideloading is a bit much, as almost certainly the vast majority of sideloaders aren’t developers. Nonetheless, it does keep sideloading as an option, and I do see why, from Google’s perspective, using the already-existing developer mode to gate the feature would be convenient in the short term. Perhaps the announcement should specify this -- I suspect a number of people who read it also noticed the lack of that clarification.
And yes, good point on ADB. That does make this less inconvenient for developers or power users, though doesn’t help non-developers very much.