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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VideoLAN Blacklists Huawei Phones on Google Play
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 31 2018, @03:25PM
Huawei have since had European employees attempt to make representations to VideoLAN developers about their devices exclusion from Google Play. There is even video of the encounter [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday July 31 2018, @03:37PM (1 child)
I'm not familiar with Play's permission. How does VLC block a particular vendor? Does it detect a custom OS on install?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 31 2018, @03:41PM
I'm pretty sure it happens right on the storefront, not during install (and VideoLAN is not preventing anyone from sideloading it).
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.videolan.vlc&hl=en_US [google.com]
Maybe something would show up where it currently says "You don't have any devices." on my laptop.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 31 2018, @04:01PM (7 children)
VLC seems to be getting worse on mobile. Right now, the current version is not able to continue playing when i replug the connector, but crashes. Atleast on my phone. It has worked fine before.
The most annoying bug is still the variable pitch bug, where VLC changes the pitch of the song, especially in the beginning. No fix even though that bug has been there who knows how long.
I have other players too, but unfortunately the playlist handling in others seem worse than in VLC. For example you can't search the songs from the playlist or the playlist dissapears on lock screen and after opening there's the song status-display on instead, and you can't choose certain song to be played next etc.
I just don't understand. There's about a million media players out there (desktop and mobile), but none of them are actually good. And before someone suggest i make my own or change some open source player, i do not have the skills or time. Sorry.
(Score: 2) by chewbacon on Tuesday July 31 2018, @04:11PM
I recently started using it on iOS and it is lackluster and difficult to use. Skips tracks for no reason, can’t toggle random play. Just bad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 31 2018, @04:20PM (2 children)
Is "Preferences | Advanced | Performance | Time-stretching audio" ticked?
In automatic mode on my phone, landscape videos play as portrait and vice versa. F#$%!!!!!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 31 2018, @05:16PM (1 child)
It is, i don't know why it should be doing any stretching though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 31 2018, @05:38PM
The pitch bug [videolan.org] you referenced is VLC attempting to sync playback to the hardware clock. It would be less detectable if, instead of a tiny pitch change, they used a timing change on faster hardware. Obviously they don't.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday July 31 2018, @04:40PM (1 child)
I put VLC on my Chromebook. I would call it the best of a bad bunch. It has done fine on the desktop and recent major versions have fixed a lot of the annoying bugs.
One interesting thing is that Chromebooks will soon support Chromebook apps, Android apps, and sandboxed Linux applications... and there's a VLC version for all 3.
I avoid playing videos on my crappy Android phone so I don't even have VLC on there. But I would not be surprised if the Android version is getting less attention than the Linux/Windows/Mac version.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Tuesday July 31 2018, @05:15PM
I installed the Android VLC on my Pixelbook. It works. But I can have a superior experience running VLC under Xfce chrooted with Crouton. The Linux VLC has better controls and UI. And it is native Intel code. I don't actually know whether the Android VLC is ARM code, or whether there is an Intel compiled version and the Play store would automagically select it.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday July 31 2018, @06:24PM
That I use it is because iTunes has always made me even _angrier_:
I have a couple tracks that I ripped with iTunes back when my ex gave me my very first MP3 player. That those tracks both exhibit iTunes' stale buffer bug is evidenced by short snippets of entirely different tracks appearing in them.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday July 31 2018, @05:02PM (4 children)
R.I.P. Golden Age of Computing 1937-2007 (ENIAC-iPhone)
If you can't control your phone then it isn't your phone. The irony in all of this is people were sold on simple computers that are both locked down and remotely managed because it was easier and therefore better. It's not. So tired of repeating this while wishing for a phone that doesn't fuck with you.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Tuesday July 31 2018, @05:19PM (3 children)
What's worse than a phone with a camera and mic that can be "remote managed"?
A TV in your home with a camera and mic that is remote managed.
Most people at least know that their phone is a privacy invasion tool. But the TV seems perfectly safe. What could go wrong?
No political leadership would ever want to obtain a list of what TV and News is viewed by the subjects in their regime.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday July 31 2018, @06:28PM
I read about that in The Columbian - the Vancouver Washington rag - in I think 2014:
The shows you watch are reported back to the cable company so they can send your TV personalized ads.
I Am Absolutely Serious.
There is no doubt in my mind that such personalized ads affected the outcome of the 2016 elections, yet I remain puzzled that in this whole time I've only heard about this from that one Columbian article.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Tuesday July 31 2018, @07:51PM (1 child)
I'd say camera/mic remote management on a phone is much worse, as you can cover up the TV camera/mic permanently without affecting its TV functionality.
Plus, political leadership nowadays can probably get that info directly from a broadcaster that uploads data from its set-top boxes. Monitoring the TV itself is so 1984.
(Score: 2) by legont on Wednesday August 01 2018, @03:02AM
That's another reason I watch, listen to, and read mostly pirated stuff.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 31 2018, @05:44PM (1 child)
The VLC developers tweeted that the APK is available from their website.
Also, I seem to remember that VLC used to be available in the F-Droid repository. For those who aren't familiar with F-Droid, it's an "app store" where the apps are mostly (all?) gratis and open-source.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday August 01 2018, @02:54PM
Do you know anybody we could hire to fix the errors preventing F-Droid from automatically building VLC media player [f-droid.org]?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 31 2018, @06:20PM (1 child)
If you can't install it without being an expert, then VLC won't get its ratings pulled down. Cause ratings for free software is the most important metric there is. Would be terrible if lusers paid for a version of Quicktime to watch their cat videos.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday July 31 2018, @06:27PM
Maybe it is more important to maintain a good impression and high ratings than to allow it to be installed on broken Huawei hardware. When it gets fixed up in a month or two, most Huawei users will be none the wiser.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 31 2018, @06:26PM (1 child)
I develop an Android app, and Android is becoming progressively more annoying with apps that run a "service", ie background process. At first it was an icon in the task bar, now its unsettling users by claiming the app is "wasting battery".
Our app has traditionally been a front end and a daemon that waits for requests, and stores expensive crypto state. Android wants apps to move to a "only wake up on push message" paradigm. It's probably possible for us to transition to something like that, but we would need to find a way how to store all our state, and then where to store it and keep private keys safe.
(Score: 4, Touché) by arslan on Tuesday July 31 2018, @10:33PM
As a user, I can't say I feel sorry for your challenge and agree with the Android requirement. Your app may specifically have the right requirements/conditions to run an active daemon all the time, but that should not be the default case as most apps don't really need it and Android pushing for "wake up when an event happens" is the right decision from a user's perspective.
Now this is what will separate the true engineers from the amateurs.
(Score: 3, Informative) by corey on Tuesday July 31 2018, @11:58PM
I have an Asus ZenFone 5Z and it is shipped with similar software to extend battery life. It's been both a boon and PITA. My battery life is pretty much 2.5-3 full days with daily web browsing, media etc. But for example, the Wire app (encrypted chat etc) doesn't receive others' messages until I unlock the phone. I'm able to tune it all and turn off optimisation on a per app basis but this one doesn't seem to work.
I like it doing this, will be better form privacy if background apps aren't talking all the time.
Love the phone otherwise.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 01 2018, @12:42AM
VLC on the desktop keeps heavily utilizing the GPU even when the video is paused and the program is minimized (unlike every other media player under the sun). Are they sure their issues on those phones are only down to the phones?