Sideloading has been a hot topic and Sameer Samat from Google gives us an update direct from the source.
When Sameer Samat joined us on Android Faithful this week, we were prepared to discuss the announcements from The Android Show: I/O Edition. We didn't think sideloading was going to come up, nor did we plan to discuss it. But when Google's President of the Android Ecosystem brought it up, we weren't going to stop him.
"I'll address this briefly even though you didn't ask for it," Samat told us, "just because I think it is important to your user base."
We have spent the better part of a year reacting to Google's overhaul of how the platform handles sideloaded apps. Google's developer verification program, first announced in 2025, will require app developers to register their identity before their apps can be installed on certified Android devices, including via sideloading. After months of pushback, Google followed up with an "advanced flow" designed to let power users continue installing apps from unverified developers, but only after they clear a series of hurdles. Those include a 24-hour waiting period that triggers once if the user leaves the setting on indefinitely.
For a community that values Android's openness, this is the kind of change that lands hard. So we asked.
Samat returned to a line he's used in public comments for months. "I've said before, many times, that sideloading is not going anywhere," he told us, but he was quick to frame the changes as a response to what Google hears from the user base it serves.
"We do have three billion plus users around the world, and we do hear a lot from them that they are having issues on their device that are making them less safe and less secure," Samat said. "A lot of people do get tricked into installing software that is not safe."
He emphasized the stakes in markets where smartphones aren't a secondary device.
That matches the rationale Google has put forward publicly. The company has cited a Global Anti-Scam Alliance report finding that 57% of adults experienced a scam in 2025, and the new sideloading flow is built around the social engineering patterns scammers use, particularly high-pressure phone calls that coach victims through disabling their device's protections in real time.
"We are trying to make sideloading safe," Samat said. "We want sideloading to be there, but we want it to be safe."
He acknowledged the rollout hasn't been smooth. "We made some changes. I know some of them were controversial. We got a bunch of feedback. We announced them with a year head start because we said we want to make these changes. What is your feedback? And the community gave us their feedback."
He pointed to two specific responses. The first was a tiered developer registration option, what Google has elsewhere described as free, limited distribution accounts for students and hobbyists that allow sharing apps with up to 20 devices without a government-issued ID or registration fee. "We added specific developer accounts that reduced the friction tremendously," Samat said.
The second is the advanced flow itself. "We added a failsafe option where if you still want to sideload something even though it doesn't pass the checks that we would highly recommend it passes, you can do it. You just have to flip your device into that mode."
In practice, that means manually enabling developer options, acknowledging risk warnings, and waiting through a one-time delay before unverified installs are permitted. Critics have argued the friction is the point, that it makes Android less open by design. Defenders have called it a near-perfect compromise on the grounds that scam victims are typically pressured to act inside a narrow window, and a one-day delay is the kind of obstacle that breaks that pressure.
Samat closed the topic with a wider pitch about how Google says it operates relative to its peers. "When we talk about Android being open, one of the things that's really important for people to understand, because I don't think they're totally used to companies acting like this these days, is we'll often say what we intend to do. We give a lot of lead time and we say we want feedback."
"I know some people say that and they're like, 'yeah, whatever, they don't want feedback, they just say that.' That's not what we're saying. We actually want the feedback, and we get the feedback, and that's part of how we iterate on things. When we say it's open, we're also open to feedback, and we get plenty of it. That's just a different way of operating than maybe some other companies out there that build mobile stuff."
You can hear our full conversation with Sameer Samat on this week's episode of Android Faithful.
