TLDR: I love sideloaded apps and they r a godsend
So I’ve been using sideloaded yt and Spotify and now I can NEVER go back. Makes me feel like a PEASANT if I do.
So a couple weeks ago I went on a 4 hour drive and sadly my sidestore time expired and I couldn’t renew due to ap ID it so I had to wait a week and by the time I would drive another 4 hours back. And let me tell you FREE SPOTIFY SUCKS ASS. I can’t go back or scrub through the songs, I can only do 6 skips per hour and replay COUNTS AS THE 6, luckily I use a vpn which blocked other company ads but SPOTIFY HAS THEIR OWN DAMN STUPID ADS EVERY 3 SONGS. And I couldn’t add songs to queue by swiping and I had to tap on the three dots and add to queue which I can’t do while on the highway. And of course I can’t play a specific song, I can’t even decide whether I want shuffle or not. And I didn’t even wanna try yt with no playing off the app or while the phone is off.
It’s as if getting into sideloading, piracy, and modding made me feel true online freedom and I can’t wait or imagine the feeling I’m going to have when I start self hosting. I’m definitely going to donate to these projects due to the improvement in my life they contributed to.
It’s nonsense. These people expect you to say “installing apps from outside the first-party app store” every time you refer to sideloading and suggest that somehow the word has a negative connotation and was made up by corpos to keep you in their silos, even though the word predates the concept altogether.