Several Huawei phones no longer allowed to get VLC from the Google Play Store, but can instead use the APK

Jul 26, 2018 07:37 GMT  ·  By

VideoLAN, the group behind the super-popular VLC media player, has decided to ban a handful of Huawei phones, technically blocking them from downloading the app from the Google Play Store.

The reason is that these devices come with a process that kills background apps, eventually limiting their functionality. With background playback capabilities, VLC itself is affected as well, and this has led to a series of negative reviews from Huawei users who thought that the app is the culprit here and not their phones.

To prevent the Google Play Store rating from dropping and to avoid criticism from users, VideoLAN has decided to blacklist a series of Huawei phones and thus block them from download VLC from the Google Play store. These devices, however, can install VLC using the stand-alone APK.

“PSA: @HuaweiMobile phones are now blacklisted and cannot get VLC on the Play Store. Their ridiculous policy of killing all background apps (except their own) breaks VLC audio background playback (of course),” VideoLAN announced in a tweet posted earlier today. “NB: Please note that this is not for all Huawei phones but just the recent ones. NB2: You can always download the apk from our website.”

Only recent models blacklisted

While there are no specifics as to the models that got blacklisted, VideoLAN says “only the recent ones” are impacted, which most likely means that devices with the battery optimization feature that kills background apps are those which can no longer get VLC from the Play Store.

As to providing instructions on how to configure the background app restrictions, VideoLAN says it can’t do that because app ratings are already going down because of the limitation.

“We are a volunteer open source project, we cannot educate millions of users while we have our ratings go to s**t because of Huawei. Doing the normal support is already taking huge amount of our time...,” the group said in a follow-up tweet. “Huawei is breaking normal Android apps to a point where they are not usable. If you can do that manually, you can install VLC manually too... Google and Huawei can be evil at the same time, you know.”

As usual, you can download the latest VLC for Android APK from Softpedia using this link.