IANAL but I think the best outcome they'll get from this is Google needing to tone down the sideloading / 3rd party store warnings. Maybe some way to be a verified publisher that removes the direness of them.
Side loading is potentially dangerous though, so warnings are good. Especially for average person who will attempt side loading not knowing the permissions they are giving to the app. I don't see a problem with the current set up, since even with it people install sketchy apks.
I don't see a problem with warnings though as someone who does side load and use F-droid to install Foss apps.
You even got on the Apple side people thinking side loading on iOS is not something they want, since they think it's easy to end up with a malware app when there's plenty of warnings and a function that needs to be enabled on Android.
I don't see it any differently really than warnings for when installing a program on Windows if it wants admin access at the start. I think Android with the terrible security updates and eol period shorter than iOS devices is hitting a nice balance of warning users of risks of installing unknown apps, but providing the flexibility for people to install whatever they want.
I think it is dangerous, since even alternative app stores have to be installed via side loading and Google doesn't allow nearly everything onto the play store (nsfw for example)
So if you want to do nearly anything nsfw with your phone and outside your browser you'll need sideloading.
While true, it is a pretty bad acronym. IANAL on mobile is more cumbersome to write than, "I'm no lawyer/I'm not a lawyer," and it's safe to say the majority of folks using social media are on mobile.
If you don’t want to see the initialism anymore, you could submit a PR to your Lemmy app that allows users like yourself to automatically expand it and similar initialisms and other shorthands in other people’s comments (preferably in a slightly different color so that it’s clear what happened when an word is erroneously or incorrectly expanded).