In recent years, regulators have attempted to combat the monopoly of two store of the most important apps in the world, App Store and Play Store, and although Google is more permissive than apple, had to come to terms with the American states (have you taken a look at our selection of the best apps for finding a job?).
In recent hours, in fact, it has been revealed that the Great G in September it reached a settlement with all 50 US states in a lawsuit over Play Store practices. It was Google itself that clarified this in a post on his blog, and one of the effects (besides having to write a check to ben 700 million dollars) is the simplification of sideload.
For those who don’t remember, sideloading is the practice that allows you to install apps on a device outside the store. Google allows it, but the opposes with a series of rather terrifying warnings, and now all this will change, making more simple the operation.
The usual very attentive person reveals what to expect Mishaal Rahman, who published the details of the news on Telegram. Basically if now, when do you try to install an app outside the Play Store, you have to go through two screens, one for warning and one for actual activation, in the future everything will be combined into one.
In fact, currently after downloading an app, for example from APK Mirrorand you tap it to install it, you will be shown a pop-up window with the warning “For your security, your phone is currently not allowed to install unknown apps from this source. You can change this option in Settings”, and if you tap the Settings item you will be redirected to the page “Install unknown apps” which allows you to enable the sideloading from the specified source.
With the new feature, the two screens they will be united and only a page will appear with a text which reads: “Your phone is not currently configured to install apps from this source. Granting this source permission to install apps could put your phone and data at risk“.
However, Google has not made this concession ad libitumand in fact will have to keep the setting as default for a period of five years after its implementation and will not be able to “introduce additional material complexity or load into the revised default sideloading flow just because an app was loaded from other sources instead of downloaded from Google Play“.
In reality the authorization only needs to be done once and after being granted the system will simply ask you if you want to install an app outside of the Play Store, but nevertheless it is a great step forward.
In its blog post, Google describes the action as a way to reaffirm the opening and the choice of users, without sacrificing security, but as we can guess it wasn’t his will.
In addition to having disbursed 700 million dollars (of which 630 million dollars will be paid into a settlement fund for consumers, while 70 million dollars will be paid into a fund for states), the terms of the agreement also include billing options alternatives in the Play Store for in-app purchases, which will allow developers to also show different options price within the app (for example offers via your own website or a third-party app store).
Google reiterated that it has tried out this alternative billing in the United States for over a year, and will now extend it to other markets as well.
