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 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!”
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.— VideoLAN (@videolan) July 25, 2018