Google Chrome could soon be less annoying when downloading APKs

When trying to install third-party apps without the Google Play Store, you need to obtain an Android application package (APK). These can be obtained from various online sources, but generally, it’s best to stick with official websites or websites that people trust. Since many hackers try to trick people into downloading malicious Android apps through fake websites, Chrome throws up a general “file might be harmful” warning when downloading any APK file. While this probably does protect a lot of Chrome users against harmful Android apps, it also unfairly maligns legitimate online sources and serves as a barrier to sideloading.

Fortunately, Google wants to reduce the number of times Chrome shows a “file might be harmful” warning. The browser will soon use the presence of Google Play Protect to decide whether to show the alert. Google Play Protect is a threat protection service built into the Play Store that determines if apps are potentially harmful. While Play Protect initially only scanned new applications that were either uploaded to Google Play by developers themselves or by users when they first sideloaded them, it’s recently been upgraded to perform some app scans on-device in real-time and will soon do even deeper scans using on-device AI. Given these improvements to Play Protect, it’s no surprise that the Chrome team now sees the “file might be harmful” warning as unnecessary.

A short video demonstrating these proposed changes was included in the issue. As you can see in the video, the warning isn’t shown during the first download because the user was prompted for the file location. During the second download, the warning was shown because the user wasn’t prompted for the file location while Play Protect was disabled. Lastly, during the third download, the warning wasn’t shown because Play Protect was re-enabled after the second download.

Hopefully, this change in Google Chrome won’t take too long to roll out. As a regular user of websites like APKMirror, I frequently encounter the “file may be harmful” warning. Since I keep Play Protect enabled like most users, I shouldn’t need to acknowledge this warning every time I download an APK file. There are a couple of really good Android apps that can only be obtained via sideloading, so getting rid of this warning could remove one barrier that prevents some users from installing them.