Post #1320228

2025-08-27 11:20 UTC

@StaticR Eh, the analogy doesn't quite work. When you cook a homemade dinner, you're not interacting with McDonald's at all, but when you "sideload" an app onto your Android phone, it's still Android. A more accurate analogy would be "bringing homemade food into a McDonald's", which... well, would be banned too. However, adding your local music library to Spotify, and adding your own local video games to Steam, both are a thing. The real question is whether Android is a service Google provides to you similar to a McDonald's restaurant (which by sideloading you're illegitimately changing) or a tool similar to a file manager, which can be used however you please. I'm also on your side obviously. It was just a bad analogy I think.

Replies (3)

@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org 2025-08-27 11:38

@lianna Thank you for bringing this up, I thought about it too but that nuance didn't fit in the 500 character limit (and I couldn't think of a catchy sidename) A more fitting analogy that takes this into account would be buying furniture for your apartment without asking your landloard and/or the company that built the house. That argument is even more favorable to googles PoV than the sideloading one because a rented house needs to be passed on in a livable state yet its still outlandish.

Open ##1320229
@noctilua@social.noleron.com 2025-08-27 14:26

@lianna @StaticR Correct. But what differs McDonald's from Android / iOS is that former one is not mandatory for eating. There are as many restaurants as stars in the sky, and it is no big deal to take the meal out or prepare one yourself and eat it wherever, be it place that allows doing so or a peak of a Hoverla mountain. In contrast, Android and iOS are both criticall structures at this point. Banking apps, countless services, even some governmental programms require one to use specifically these two pieces of software. You have to use one of the two to be a first-class citizen. It's like a MacDonald's analogy, except you can actually only eat in MacD' or KFC (maybe all silverware is only compatible with these two, or patties are patented, idunno whatever). One has banned «sidedining» long ago, now the other one joins the cause.

Open ##1320232
@leeloo@chaosfem.tw 2025-08-28 12:34

@lianna @StaticR If you really want to go that way, sidedining would be to bring you own food into a building that used to be owned by McDonalds, before you bought it.

Open ##1320242