@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.

@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.