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The game studio I worked for hated side loading. It's often used by fake sites (including crypto mining and identity theft sites) to offer "free" apps which are

The game studio I worked for hated side loading. It's often used by fake sites (including crypto mining and identity theft sites) to offer "free" apps which are really just APKs from legitimate publishers. The user is left with an app that won't be updated or get bug fixes and may not even work at all because of ongoing changes in the game server and its APIs. Our game was entirely free to play and there was no way to get any additional stuff by using a side loaded APK from someone else. To make matters worse, users put themselves at risk when they enter their personal information like passwords and payment info into these illegitimate APKs as it can be captured by modified versions of the apps, which is why folks distribute them.

_gllen 2y ago
If you have any more info on this, would love to hear more. I spent a couple days trying to deconstruct what the apk sites bidding on adwords for our brand (ecommerce free app) were doing. Proxied traffic and didn’t see anything fishy. Chalked it up to ad arbitrage in the end. Didn’t seem like getting people to download the apk was the primary goal. (email in my profile if you want to share privately)
josephcsible 2y ago
> To make matters worse, users put themselves at risk when they enter their personal information like passwords and payment info into these illegitimate APKs as it can be captured by modified versions of the apps, which is why folks distribute them. But if people are modifying your APK anyway, wouldn't they just remove this check too?
- dtagames 2y ago
  I'm referring to bad actors adding things to the APK or altering it, though there is more evidence of the issue raised in the post below yours: folks who attempt to gather info from users in order to offer the software (outside the app stores) and from those pages collect other user info and introduce malware.

_gllen 2y ago

If you have any more info on this, would love to hear more. I spent a couple days trying to deconstruct what the apk sites bidding on adwords for our brand (ecommerce free app) were doing. Proxied traffic and didn’t see anything fishy. Chalked it up to ad arbitrage in the end. Didn’t seem like getting people to download the apk was the primary goal. (email in my profile if you want to share privately)

josephcsible 2y ago

> To make matters worse, users put themselves at risk when they enter their personal information like passwords and payment info into these illegitimate APKs as it can be captured by modified versions of the apps, which is why folks distribute them. But if people are modifying your APK anyway, wouldn't they just remove this check too?

dtagames 2y ago
I'm referring to bad actors adding things to the APK or altering it, though there is more evidence of the issue raised in the post below yours: folks who attempt to gather info from users in order to offer the software (outside the app stores) and from those pages collect other user info and introduce malware.