How I sideloaded Sideraven on an Android tablet and moved my bookmarks

I've been trying out browsers built for tablets lately, and Sideraven kept coming up in conversations. It's a fork of Iceraven — an Android browser from the Firefox family — with one headline feature: a vertical tab sidebar aimed at tablet screens, styled after Zen Browser. It lives on GitHub and has no affiliation with Zen Browser or Mozilla.

Since it's a side-loaded app, nothing goes through a store. The path is GitHub → APK → adb, and bookmarks travel as a plain HTML file. I got through the whole thing in roughly 20 minutes at an intermediate level. Here's the route.

Gather your kit first

Collect everything before you plug anything in. Nearly every failure I hit traced back to a missing precondition, so checking up front keeps the install step a single continuous run instead of five restarts.

• An Android tablet. The vertical sidebar is the entire point of the fork, so don't test on a phone. The announcement post doesn't state a minimum Android version — check the repository README for the floor.
• Free storage for the APK plus the installed app. The release asset size is listed on the GitHub Releases page, so read it there instead of guessing.
• USB debugging enabled. On the tablet: Settings → About tablet → tap Build number seven times → back → Developer options → enable USB debugging.
• adb on your computer, from Android platform-tools. It's the command-line bridge that installs packages and copies files to the device.
• Git, but only if you plan to build from source rather than download a prebuilt APK.
• bookmarks.html, an export of your current bookmarks from your desktop browser. That file is the transport format for Step 3.
• A trust decision. This is a community fork with no Mozilla or Zen Browser involvement, so install it on a secondary tablet or a device you're willing to wipe.

My checklist before starting:

• [ ] Tablet boots, USB debugging is on
• [ ] adb runs in a terminal on the computer
• [ ] Bookmarks exported to bookmarks.html
• [ ] README of Dweep4269/sideraven open in a browser tab
• [ ] Free space confirmed against the release asset size

With the tablet plugged in, confirm the bridge works:

adb devices

You want one line with a serial number and the word device:

List of devices attached
R58M12ABCDE device

If it says unauthorized, unlock the tablet and tap Allow on the USB debugging prompt. And if you don't have a spare tablet lying around, you can rehearse the whole flow in a desktop Android environment — an emulator, Waydroid, or a cloud device — before touching real hardware.

Step 1: Clone the repo and pick your artifact

Start by pulling the source, which also gives you the README where the Android floor and build flags live:

git clone https://github.com/Dweep4269/sideraven.git
cd sideraven
git log -1 --oneline

A single commit line (hash plus message) tells you the clone completed. Then run ls — you should see the source tree (app/, build.gradle, README*, and so on). An empty folder or a .git-only directory means the clone failed; rerun it on a stable connection.

Next, open the repository's Releases page in a browser and look for an .apk asset. The announcement post only confirms the project is published on GitHub — it doesn't promise a prebuilt binary and it doesn't give a version number, so check the documentation or README for the current release tag. No APK attached? You're building from source in Step 2.

Small habit that pays off: if the asset is named something like sideraven-<tag>.apk, rename it to sideraven.apk in your working directory. Then the install command stays identical every time you retry.

Step 2: Sideload the APK on the tablet

adb install -r sideraven.apk

Expected output:

Performing Streamed Install
Success

The -r flag means "replace if already installed", so re-running after a new download is safe. If adb isn't on your PATH, call it by full path, e.g. ~/platform-tools/adb install -r sideraven.apk.

Building from source instead uses the standard Android Gradle flow. The post doesn't document the exact task or output path, so confirm both in the README:

./gradlew assembleDebug
adb install -r app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk

Why go through adb rather than copying the APK with a file manager: the command pushes straight into the device's package manager and skips the "unknown sources" dialog, so you get a machine-readable Success or a specific error code instead of an ambiguous UI response.

Then confirm the package registered:

adb shell pm list packages | grep -i sideraven

You should get one package:<application-id> line. The ID is defined in the repo's Gradle config — use whatever string actually appears and write it down, because you'll want it if anything misbehaves later.

Step 3: Check the tablet layout and migrate bookmarks

Launch Sideraven and open a few tabs. You're looking for a vertical tab strip, not a top tab row — that's the fork's whole reason to exist.

Now the bookmarks. Export from your current browser first (in most desktop browsers: bookmarks manager → export bookmarks to HTML). Then push the file and verify it landed:

adb push bookmarks.html /sdcard/Download/bookmarks.html
adb shell ls -l /sdcard/Download/bookmarks.html

The second command should print one -rw-rw---- line with a non-zero byte size.

In Sideraven: browser menu → Bookmarks → Manage bookmarks → the overflow menu (⋮) → Import from file → pick /sdcard/Download/bookmarks.html. Labels follow the upstream Firefox/Iceraven family, but a fork can rename entries, so check the docs if an item seems missing.

After importing, the bookmark list should show a folder named after the source profile (something like Bookmarks Menu) with your links inside. Sanity-check the count against the file itself on your computer:

grep -c "<A HREF" bookmarks.html

The reason this works: the HTML export is plain, browser-agnostic Netscape-format markup that this importer family can parse, and pushing it via adb avoids cloud sync the fork may not support at all.

One pass to verify everything

Check	Action	Expected result
App launches	tap the Sideraven icon	browser window, no crash dialog
Sidebar renders	open 3+ tabs	vertical tab strip visible, not a top row
Bookmarks present	menu → Bookmarks	imported folder with your links
File integrity	adb shell ls -l /sdcard/Download/bookmarks.html	non-zero size

Two quick fixes if the pass fails: unauthorized in adb devices means unlock the tablet and tap Allow, and a missing menu entry usually means the fork renamed it — check the repository docs before assuming the import is broken.

If you want the raw walkthrough with screenshots, this article was originally published on AI Release — https://ai-release.org — and shorter notes land in the channel at https://t.me/ai_release1.

Takeaway

Sideraven is a narrow, community-built fork, and side-loading it is really just three commands: clone, adb install -r, adb push. The part worth remembering is the migration pattern — a standard HTML bookmark export moves cleanly between browsers that share the Firefox lineage, no account or cloud sync required. Keep two things in your notes: the application ID from pm list packages and the release tag you installed, so the next update is a two-minute job instead of a rediscovery.