New Unknown Sources Settings on your OnePlus 5T
Many of you have seen that the Android 8.0 Oreo stable build is finally available on the OnePlus 5T via the OxygenOS 5.0.2 stable OTA update and some of you are already lucky. According to the changelog, the smartphone is ready for an entire list of changes: a new design for Quick Settings, general bug fixes and improvements, a new CPU security patch, the Launcher app has been updated to version 2.2, the File Manager app has been updated to version 1.7.6, not to mention all the regular changes brought by Android including New Unknown Sources Settings on your OnePlus 5T.
One of Android’s biggest strengths regarding other mobile operating systems is how simple it is to sideload apps that aren’t hosted on the Google Play Store. To sideload apps on your OnePlus 5T running on previous Android versions, all you had to do was to enable “Unknown Sources” in Settings, then to open the APK. With the new Android 8.0, this setting is completely gone. Yes, Google has removed that Unknown Sources switch, but don’t worry as you can still install apps from sources other than Google Play Store.
At the moment, you must basically trust individual apps before you can install APKs they’ve downloaded on your OnePlus 5T. Well, before saying that this is not something that you are willing to do in the near future, let me remind you that unknown sources is a scary label for a pretty simple thing: a source for interesting apps you want to install from a place that is not trusted and this is pretty much the same thing that you did before, but under a different name.
So, instead of being a user setting, Google has turned it into an “Install unknown apps” permission that a developer has to explicitly enable for an app. By turning it into a permission, you must agree to the warning each and every time you want to install such an app on your OnePlus 5T. Besides that, the permission is asked before the app is actually installed, so you can always check which apps have been given such a permission and revoke it at any time.
For example, when you download an APK through Firefox, you’ll be prompted to review your External Sources settings. You must select Firefox from the list, then make sure that the “Trust apps from this source” option is enabled. After that, you’ll be able to sideload the APK you downloaded with Firefox.
The very same procedure applies when using other apps, so the change is not at all complicated!
