Bundles are tossing a wrench into the works of Android sideloading

When’s the last time you sideloaded an app on Android? The ability for users to directly install software they’ve acquired themselves (as opposed to finding it through the platform’s approved app store) is one of the core tenets that distinguishes Android from the likes of iOS. But just because it’s possible doesn’t always mean it’s a good idea — to say nothing of easy. But now Google seems to be tweaking its approach to app distribution in a way that threatens to be a serious thorn in the side of sideloading.

Historically, you’ve been able to manually install Android apps by means of an APK file: a single file that packaged up all an app’s resources in an convenient, easy-to-distribute format. Problem is, apps are far from one-size-fits-all, and trying to accommodate everyone all at once quickly becomes unwieldly. Back in 2018, Google rethought this approach and came up with a more modular solution: Android App Bundles.

With bundles, there’s one core component to the app, and then others are served via Dynamic Delivery, which lets the app only request the data from the Play Store that you actually need. That allows your device to get away with not downloading the code for features you’re not interested in using, or support for languages you don’t speak.

In theory, that sounds very cool and efficient. But in practice, it makes it a lot more difficult to install apps from outside a market like the Play Store. While we’ve seen solutions, these involve third-party apps and are inherently more cumbersome than Android’s native APK support.

Up to now, though, not everyone had gone all-in on bundles, and you could still find single APKs for many apps. But this week, APKMirror founder Artem Russakovskii took to X to comment on a user complaint from GitHub, reporting that his site has recently stopped seeing submissions of the old “fat” APKs for many popular apps, which now seem to only be available as app bundles. This complaint specifically dealt with the X/Twitter app, which has recently gone bundle-only.

For anyone who does a lot of sideloading, that’s going to be an annoyance, absolutely. That said, it also feels like the sort of change that was going to happen eventually — and indeed, we’re already seeing several sentiments expressing surprise at this move not having occurred sooner.

Making the timeline even more odd, this is happening right on the heels of our discovery of an in-progress Play Store tweak that might actually make it work better with sideloaded apps. In any case, the good news is that if you’re the sort of Android user who gets their apps through the Play Store and the Play Store alone, this change is not going to impact you in the slightest.

We’ve reached out to Google for comment on this apparent shift, and will update this post with any information we receive.