Fair points. I was mostly thinking of situations like downloading using a separate device, writing to a usb drive or SD card and installing via that. Downloading an installer and using it is just downloading without using an app store.

I’ve always took side-loading to mean installing from local storage, as opposed to downloading from remote storage. As far as I’m concerned downloading from a third party app store should not be treated as side-loading.

So do you think that shipping companies should charge fees to both sender and recipient? Because that’s the physical equivalent of this situation.

I pay my ISP to deliver data to me at an agreed rate. The data being streamed from the bandwidth heavy sources has been paid for… By me. It would be wrong for my ISP to then go and charge them for the bandwidth that I’m using, much in the same way it would be wrong for a company to both charge the sender and receiver of a package just because that package is heavier than normal.

And many of the CDN agreements that bandwidth heavy content providers sign with ISPs have favourable terms specifically because those ISPs recognise that having good access to that content is exactly what their customers are paying for… At least the ones not completely blinded by greed do.