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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.
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.
In that case the smart users won't have Samsung phones either, as the S8 does exactly the same thing. I installed Google SMS app, replacing Samsung's. It took me ages to figure out why SMS's were going missing. Turned out Samsung was killing it. They whitelist their own SMS app, of course.