Sideloading an Android application from a website

You might want to supply your Android application outside of the Play store. This might be for testing or simply because you don’t want or need your application to go through the Play store (i.e. a bespoke application for a company).

Assuming you’ve got your APK file you can simply drop in onto a web site and link to it (or supply the location). For example

<html>
  <head>
    <title>My Android Application</title>
  </head>
  <body>
      <p>
      <h2>Install My Android application by clicking on 
this <a href="com.puridparrot.myapp.apk">link</a>
      </h2>
    </p>
  </body>
</html>

Simple enough – we might need to set the mime type, for example here’s the web.config for IIS

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <staticContent>
      <mimeMap 
         fileExtension=".apk" 
         mimeType="application/vnd.android.package-archive" />
    </staticContent>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

Now when you click this link from your device it’ll download the file and install it, you will need to set “Unknown sources” on to allow this to happen.

The downsides of this approach are that you obviously don’t get any notifications for updates to an application, also you’ll get a couple of security prompts to remind the user that this app. may not be from a trusted source.