Can you not just install an android app from a website? I always thought that was part of the attraction of Android - you could install without an app store requirement like ios. Actually.... I seem to remember building a couple android apps and just linking from a website but... that was... 8(!) years ago. Is that still a thing? Was it ever, or did I just misremember that?
1. It's disabled by default. You have to dig around in your phone's settings to enable APK installations, and APK installations through the specific app you prompted the installer from. And if the developer hasn't updated the app for recent versions of Android, Google will throw up a antivirus-esque "warning this app is unsafe blah blah" prompt.
2. You can't automatically update an app if you manually installed it through an APK. There are apps that can kind of do this (automatically download APK from source website on new release, notify user). But that's clunky and not suitable unless your audience is FOSS-land. Oh, and the user still has to manually click the install button for each app they update this way. No silent updates unless you're rooted.
This makes the distribution of apks through your own processes wholly unviable unless your app is mandatory for your users (I. E for work/school), or your user base is Android FOSS enthusiasts - who probably prefer that you use F-Droid (3rd party FOSS appstore) anyways
> It's disabled by default. You have to dig around in your phone's settings to enable APK installations
At least since the time that the "install apps from unknown sources" permission was migrated from a global toggle to an app-specific permission (maybe even before that?), the dialogue that pops up to tell you that installation has been blocked has a button for directly taking you to the correct settings screen for toggling the permission, so it's just two extra taps.
Sure, at scale even that will confuse/scare off some users, but it's not insurmountable and nowhere near as obscure as having "to dig around in your phone's settings" – just two extra taps and you're good to go (unless your phone manufacturer has made things more complicated there, which does remain a possibility).
Thanks. I've asked people to do testing like this, and with limited people it was manageable. And the last android app I did was internal to a company with maybe 15 users. Getting people to do install/update was ... manageable, just.
