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While the Google Play Store is undoubtedly the number one destination for downloading the best Android apps, it’s not the only repository for them. There are several app stores and third-party websites from which you can download Android apps. However, if you use Google Chrome to download Android apps from online sources, you usually have to accept that the files may be harmful before Chrome will allow you to download them. However, Google Chrome for Android may soon reduce how often it warns you about downloading Android apps.

When trying to install third-party apps without the Google Play Store, you need to get an Android app package (APK). These can be obtained from various online sources, but generally it is best to stick to official websites or websites that people trust. As many hackers try to trick people into downloading malicious Android apps through fake websites, Chrome displays a generic “the file may be harmful” warning when downloading an APK file. While this likely protects many Chrome users against harmful Android apps, it also unfairly abuses legitimate online sources and serves as a barrier to sideloading.

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

That’s why the Chrome team at Google is preparing to disable the “file may be harmful” warning when Google Play Protect is enabled. This is evidenced by a series of Chromium code changes tracked by this issue on the Google Issue Tracker. In another issue, Googlers from the Chrome team say that it has been decided to show the “file may be harmful” warning only if Google Play Protect is disabled. If Play Protect is disabled, Chrome will display an additional warning after the download is complete to enable the service. It’s worth noting that if users are prompted for the file location when downloading a file, then the “file may be dangerous” warning won’t appear even if Play Protect is disabled, which Google says is consistent with Chrome’s behavior for desktop.

A short video demonstrating these proposed changes was included in the release. As you can see in the video, the warning does not appear during the first download because the user was prompted for the location of the file. During the second download, the warning was displayed because the user was not prompted for the location of the file while Play Protect was disabled. Finally, during the third download, the warning does not appear because Play Protect was re-enabled after the second download.

This change in behavior is distributed in two parts. The first part will see the addition of Google Play Protect’s “dangerous downloads” prompt. In other words, when downloading APK files, Chrome will warn users to enable Play Protect if it’s disabled. The flag for this has just been added to the Chrome Canary track, but is not yet enabled by default. However, it will soon be enabled by default, as Google says “the new behavior is small enough that we don’t plan to A/B test this launch.” The second part will disable the “file may be harmful” warning when Play Protect is activated. While a flag for this part has also been added to Chrome Canary, Google says it “will not ship [this] behavior change as part of the immediate launch of Google Play Protect,” but that it’s “still likely to ship in the near future.”

Hopefully it won’t take long to implement this change in Google Chrome. As a regular user of websites like APKMirror, I often come across the “file may be harmful” warning. Since I keep Play Protect enabled like most users, I don’t have to confirm this warning every time I download an APK file. There are some really good Android apps that can only be obtained by sideloading, so removing this warning may remove a barrier that prevents some users from installing them.