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VLC Blacklists Newer Huawei Devices To Combat Negative App Reviews (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Some newer Huawei phones are actively being blocked from installing the open-source VLC media player app from Google Play. VLC's developers announced today that they're blacklisting some of Huawei's devices after unhappy users left too many one-star reviews for the app. But the negative reviews stem from a decision on Huawei's part and has nothing to do with VLC. 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 devices being blacklisted are the Huawei P8, P10, and P20. Users can still manually download the APK from VLC's website if they're interested in using the player.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
The smart users will go to Google and learn how to download the separate APK while also disabling the power saving features.
My Nokia phone also kills background process after a couple minutes, but it does that on Google Play music as well as VLC, so I can't just blame VLC for it.
Because if the device itself it set to close background tasks, there is nothing an app developer can do. The OS will always have a higher level of run time then the apps, in other words.. the OS will always win.
Sadly I have similar issues with PC software I write. The code works great, but the moron owning the computer doesn't know how to maintain their machine. Typically this is an issue with Windows users, but some OSX and noobie Linux users as well. In the end they hurt sales and fill customer support tickets. Yes "Dillon" I know you "have all the antivirus, windows, everything else updated", but Intel is still showing a video driver 7 years newer than the one currently on your shitty laptop. Please download and install it from them like I asked you to do 4 times...
It's just the way computing is these days. We let dumb asses access the network. You live with it. Lucky for VLC they have a way to block idiots.
While I love my Mate 9 I did have to fiddle with the battery saving settings to get the right balance for me. VLC works fine for me though.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
You can't fix the issue if the OS is doing it without forcefully editing the OS. Huawei phones have a built in "background app killer" app that is enabled by default. You'd have to have the right permissions and possibly be root to force an exception on your own, and any app that gets around it is basically acting like a virus.
Actually, the second sentence should be part of the summary. This one:
Huawei phones have a built in "background app killer" app that is enabled by default.
Don't leave reviews if you are uninformed.
I am not disagreeing with you, but go and have a look at one star reviews on Google Play, a whole bunch of them consist of "Does not work. Help".
People are idiots.
Except play music. I think some people install and use it for that feature alone.
And this is slashdot, whose summaries are always complete, concise and accurate. There is zero reason to read the article.
Speaking of the article, it said this:
What makes you assume there's any way to do that programmatically? This is something being done by a pre-installed app on those phones. If it presents any sort of API, it's not documented.
All they know is the specific models with that mis-feature, so they blacklisted them.
VideoLAN's VLC player is the best media player around. Period. Nothing is even close. If you have a media file and want to play it, VLC Player does it well with a minimum of drama...and it's free.
I'm glad they're doing this. All they have is their reputation. They don't need it tarnished by malware-infested Chinese crap-phones running an OS designed to make personal privacy a quaint historical footnote.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I had a Huawei and I experienced endless problems with background apps. I also develop mobile games.
If a device doesn't have enough RAM to run your program, you must block installation. If a device doesn't have the needed processing power to give a decent user experience, you should either rewrite the app to use different resources and lighter logic on low-end devices, or block those devices.
If the OS causes your users to have a bad experience, you should work around it or stop development and distribution for that OS. All the better of the app is open source, so someone else could pick up development targeting that platform without directly hurting your brand if their users have a bad experience.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
There is no on device solution to the problem, though. When I had a Huawei, you could start by setting the device to use max power all the time, but that would only solve problems related to background services like reminders and other notifications. There was no way to prevent backgrounded apps from being killed.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
Sure you can and its easy, watch..../user tries to install VLC, gets pop up message/ "Hi, VLC here, did you know that (insert phone) that you are trying to install VLC on has a "feature" that will ruin your experience using VLC? If you wish to continue using VLC here is how to disable it, if you would prefer to keep this feature please press the cancel button to stop installing VLC"....TADA!
This will protect their rep and let the user know its NOT the fault of VLC, its the phone. It will even tell the user in simple language how to fix it if they would rather have VLC than this aggressive battery crapware. Give the user the information and let them choose which they would prefer...user choice...its a good thing.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You obviously don't know users... They will just ignore it, either to lazy to read or to lazy to bother and will conveniently forget about it when they encounter the issue. vlc blocking installing is a perfectly valid response to deal with the issue for a small usergroup especially since there still a workaround. Anyone smart enough to mess with the phone configuration is smart enough to manual install the app as well.
Users to blacklist Huawei.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
No, it has nothing to do with performance, here it is straight from the developer's mouth:
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=145236
Huawei devices are now forbidden to download VLC. We're fed up with their OS breaking VLC all the time.
Huawei basically kills VLC when the screen is shutting down. So that kills VLC when it plays audio in background.
This is childish behavior as a developer; there are many other (better-for-users) ways to deal with - including, if you detect those devices, show a message explaining that background audio won't work on this device for reason X. I am affected by this issue; I used to like VLC and actually would have wanted to use it to play videos (I don't care about background audio), but this petty behavior - randomly blocking long-time VLC fans like me from using it (for no reason as I don't even use the background audio feature) by banning entire ranges of devices. They're basically 'attacking' their own users just to spite a particular vendor.
They're actually good phones, really fast, perform well, there is no 'performance problem' - this is a very specific issue and behavior that isn't a performance issue. Other developers seem to manage to release Apps that work for these phones without mass-blocking them.
Developing for a broad variety of platforms means encountering issues with specific platforms, and dealing with it in a reasonable way; if you're a developer you have to expect that.
VLC is a media player. And I like listening to my phone without draining battery by keeping the screen on.
Chinese users are obsessed with installing dozens if not hundreds apps some of which love to stay in background, wake your phone every 10 seconds or even prevent it from going to deep sleep at all, which is why almost all Chinese OEMs implement various measures to keep battery usage within sane limits and as a result Android from China will prevent many "normal" (properly coded) apps from working correctly. In this case I fully support VLC developers.
but this petty behavior - randomly blocking long-time VLC fans like me from using it
They aren't doing that. They are blocking you from installing it from Google Play. If you download the APK, you can still install it.
With that said, I agree that a better solution would be to disable the feature in question on those devices until the user disables the killer.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Just tell people in-app on likely impacted devices "Your phone has power management that keeps VLC from playing in the background. Please ((go here)) and exempt it if you want to use background audio." Depending on how Android kills background processes it's probably also feasible to detect if this is happening and present that alert in that case - or I guess they can just continue blacklisting manufacturers as more and more of them do similar things to extend battery life. "VLC: The best background player you can have on your phone we haven't blacklisted yet."
Heck, is the power management they're talking about a Huawei thing or an Oreo thing?
On my phone (slightly older, so not yet on Oreo) I get a notification that "App X is consuming power in the background" and can kill it or ignore the warning. I can disable that power management on a per-app basis pretty easily - in settings I just type "power" in the search box and select the "Power-intensive apps" result. Within that, I have several options for how aggressive the phone will be on power saving, including a list of "Apps that will be closed after the screen is locked" and a separate list of "Power-intensive apps" that also shows why they're classified that way. Reasons I see seem to be limited to "High Location Frequency" and "Keep Awake" on my phone. Selecting any app gives me quite a bit more detail on its power use and control over whether to close it, etc.
What I like about my phone is that even though it's closing in on 2 years old I got the latest security patches for it just a few days ago and despite having shipped with Marshmallow (6) it got an OTA upgrade to Nougat (7) and is due for an upgrade to Oreo (8) likely within the next month (already released for some international models). I sure didn't get updates like that on my Samsung or HTC phones, nice as they might have been.
fencepost
just a little off
They can't query the OS to see what it is running on launch, and if it's Huawei's EMUI thing or whatever then show a box to the user saying that background playback won't work unless they do ${action}?
You're saying that just isn't possible? I have a feeling you're an idiot and haven't thought this through.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
And they can't display dialogs with hyperlinks any more?
"We see you're running on a device model where a setting will need to be changed in order to enable background playback. More information about how to enable this can be found at [link] [X] don't show this again"
Oh hey look, problem solved without being draconian and boorishly stupid.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Oh, so I only have to go around the security protections that come from getting signed code from a trusted source, and instead sideload a package that could have been fucked with by unknown actors because the VLC team are being petty and petulant about this, and adopted a user-surly "solution" to the problem instead of documenting and taking 30 seconds to add a dialog on launch of the app on a device which exhibits this behavior.
What a wonderful app development team that in no way is overreacting to an external problem.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Then just say that to the user. "Your device doesn't support background playback due to a software decision made by Huawei. If this feature is important to you, contact them about supporting background media playback on their devices, and we'll happily enable support in a future version. [Got it]"
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The people complaining are exactly the ones that typically install software with OK,OK,OK,agree,OK,OK and don't even read the dialogs.
If you're not that sort of user, you can still sideload the APK directly from VLC's site and make the necessary change.
If you download the APK
So I must jump through extra hoops, for no reason, because the developer wants to spite the vendor, due to an issue over a feature I don't even use ... no thank you, I don't jump through hoops for nobody. I'm a software developer and I don't make my users jump through unnecessary extra hoops on my own emotional wims. I'll just use alternatives.
As I said, I used to be a VLC fan, but this grates me.
So I must jump through extra hoops, for no reason, because the developer wants to spite the vendor, due to an issue over a feature I don't even use ... no thank you, I don't jump through hoops for nobody.
Nonsense. You jump through hoops every day. If you didn't, you'd be in prison already. Government is quite intolerant of people who refuse hoop-jumping.
I'll just use alternatives.
Good luck finding an alternative which is anywhere near as good as VLC at doing what it does. I don't think there is one. You could use Kodi, and it would do all the same stuff, but it also has some liabilities like increased load time, resource consumption, and attack surface.
As I said, I used to be a VLC fan, but this grates me.
So you have one of the three affected devices? You know the affected devices behave in a non-standard fashion, right? Therefore, using them correctly involves jumping through hoops, to make them behave normally. You literally cannot avoid jumping through hoops here if you want things to work the way they are expected to work. Or are you just virtue signaling?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"