“Google wants to make sideloading apps with old SDKs more difficult with Android 14”

With Android 14, it becomes more difficult to sideload older apps, according to a code change found. Google would like to prevent malware with this. Sideloading those older apps can then only be done via the command shell.

With Android 14, Google wants to make it more difficult to install apps that use an SDK version that belongs to the first Android versions. That writes 9To5Google based on code changes that have since been made private. Malware often uses old SDK versions to bypass operating system protections.

With recent Android versions it is already impossible to install new apps with outdated sdk versions via the Play Store, but this is still possible with sideloading. This means that users can still install malware apps. With the upcoming Android version, Google would like to prevent this by also making sideloading those apps more difficult.

At first it only concerns very old SDK versions that cannot be installed on Android 14, so Android 6 apps can still be sideloaded, for example. But Google would like to increase this SDK threshold in the future, so that apps with the Android 6 SDK version cannot simply be installed.

These blocked, old apps can still be installed with a new flag in the command shell, if a user wishes to do so. The average user is unlikely to do this so quickly, which should make the operating system more secure, according to Google.