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takyon writes:

Huawei's aggressive battery management on some of its newer phones can cause background apps to be shut down unexpectedly. This has led to one-star reviews for affected apps, such as VLC on Google Play. In response, VideoLAN has blacklisted these phones:

The negative reviews are a result of Huawei's aggressive battery management and tendency to kill background apps, which directly affects VLC's background audio playback feature. Huawei users on VLC's forums are well aware of the issue. It's possible to manually disable these battery optimizations and have the app function properly in the background, but VLC claims that people often don't know how to do that, so they blame the app instead.

The VLC team is specifically blacklisting the Huawei P8, P10, and P20, but users of those devices can still manually download the APK from VLC's website if they're interested in using the player; they're just being blocked from getting it via Google Play. Huawei Honor phones aren't affected. In a tweet translated from French, VideoLAN said, "Blocking normal Android functions is totally abnormal. In that case, why not kill all the apps, and keep the phone off, that would save even more battery!"

VideoLAN said that Huawei refused to whitelist VLC (to prevent the battery-saving feature from killing the application) while whitelisting "competitors". Later, the project got "an answer from Huawei", but the solution could take weeks to arrive.

See also: VideoLAN was right to ban Huawei phones from downloading VLC, but it's users that lose (archive)

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