Microsoft this week enabled a previously promised feature for
Windows Phone 8:
You can now download Windows Phone apps to your PC, copy them to the
phone’s micro-SD card, and then install them on the device. This process
is called side-loading.
Note:
This feature is only available to Windows Phone 8 handsets that have a
micro-SD card. You cannot use this technique to install apps from your
phone’s internal storage, which means that this feature doesn’t work
with the most popular Windows Phone 8 handsets, like the Nokia Lumia 920
and HTC 8X.
Before explaining how this works, the big question that needs to
be answered is why anyone would want to do this. Two main reasons
emerge. First, those with limited data plans may simply prefer to
download apps with their PC and then install them to the device without
risking much data usage. (Though to be fair, this process is a bit
ponderous and you can always use Wi-Fi.) Second, if you reset your
phone, this isn’t a bad way to stockpile apps you wish to reinstall
quickly all in a batch.
Here’s how it works.
On your PC, visit the
Windows Phone Store
online via your web browser. Then, visit the landing page for any app
or game. In the left column, at the very bottom and well hidden, you
will see a link called
Download and install manually. Click that to download the app. (Or, right-click and choose Save as.)
The file that’s downloaded is called a
XAP file because of its file extension, and it’s basically an encrypted
ZIP file that contains all of the files needed to install the app.
To copy the XAP file to your phone,
connect the phone with a USB cable and then use File Explorer to
navigate to its SD card. Then, just drag and drop the file into the root
of the SD card.
Now, disconnect the phone from your PC
and power it off and then restart it. (Microsoft says you can just “wait
a few minutes” but I’ve never gotten that to work reliably.) When the
phone reboots, visit Windows Phone Store and you should see an entry
called SD Card at the bottom of the main store menu.
Tap that link and you will see a list of
the apps on the SD card. Just select the ones you want to install and
tap Install.
A few final notes.
Installing the apps will not remove the
XAP files from the SD card, so you will need to do that manually later,
using File Explorer on your PC.
Free and trial apps (and games) install
normally. But if you install a paid app this way, the behavior will be a
bit different. For paid apps with a trial version, the trial version
will install; you can replace that with the paid version by installing
the app against from Windows Phone Store on the phone. For paid apps
without a trial version, you will need to install the app manually from
the store on the phone.
If enough time goes by it’s possible that the version
of the app installer on the SD card is not the most recent version. If
this happens, you will need to install the latest version, and the
out-of-date app installer on the SD card will not work.
The phone needs to be online at the time of app install.
