Google wants you to handle all your storage needs through Drive and Google Photos, where they are in control, can scrape more data, train models on your photos, and push you onto paid storage plans.
I can’t really see the benefit to Google in having an excellent local file manager with wide archive-file support. It doesn’t profit them in any way that I can think of.
Thankfully the workaround isn’t too bad, just installing an alternative file manager.
I think a big part of it for RAR specifically is that it’s a proprietary format that would technically require Google to license it, and for the tiny percentage of users that would benefit, they don’t bother.
A seemingly random but relevant example is the Japanese travel card situation with Pixel phones—every pixel on the planet has the necessary hardware to support Japanese travel cards since the pixel 6, however only pixel phones bought in Japan can use the feature (locked by the OS) because it would mean Google would have to pay a per-device cost worldwide.
This is kinda a similar situation I’d bet, they’ve proven they would rather not include the feature than pay for licensing
And there’s not really any money to be made charging licenses to open source projects—see ffmpeg/vlc
Google including it in android though means they can charge licenses as a per unit fee because, basically, Google (or phone manufacturers) is a company with money.
Google including it in android though means they can charge licenses as a per unit fee because, basically, Google (or phone manufacturers) is a company with money.
What? This has literally nothing to do with unrar’s license terms.
We’re talking about Android, unrar doesn’t have anything to do with this really.
The entire topic is about RAR archive support on Android, so of course the freely available source code of unrar, released by the RAR developer himself, has absolutely to do with everything here.
RAR is and will continue to be a proprietary format with an owner who can seek royalties.
Nope, unrar’s source code is free, released by RAR’s developer.
It’s like saying Google should stop licensing MPEG because ffmpeg exists—it simply doesn’t work like that
Nope, it absolutely isn’t like that. You just have no clue at all.
<span style="color:#323232;"> Unrar source may be used in any software to handle RAR archives
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> without limitations free of charge, but cannot be used to re-create
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> the RAR compression algorithm, which is proprietary. Distribution
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> of modified Unrar source in separate form or as a part of other
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> software is permitted, provided that it is clearly stated in
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> the documentation and source comments that the code may not be used
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> to develop a RAR (WinRAR) compatible archiver.
</span>
It’s not FOSS, given that it comes with the provision that no RAR compressor can be created based on unrar source code but for browsing and extracting RAR archives, the unrar source code as is is absolutely fine.
Ah fair play, I didn’t realise unrar was from the same guy, cheers for the extra context.
So I guess we go back to what else it could be:
The licence could still be an issue as it’s not FOSS and parts of android are, so I guess that could prevent its inclusion if it’s incompatible with existing licences
The licence could also be an issue in terms of wanting feature parity with zip support, which would include creation of archives.
As I mentioned before, the percentage of users who are interacting with non-zip archives locally on their devices is a pretty small percentage. It may be on the backlog, but it’s not going to be far from the bottom in priority.
How many of the use cases are not served by the third party app ecosystem sufficiently that it would benefit inclusion in the actual OS and the extra maintenance that would entail
RAR is an outdated format and in decline at this point, there are better options to add before getting to it
Let’s also address the elephant in the room regarding the last point—I don’t think I’ve seen RARs used regularly outside of piracy in quite some time. If that’s the main use case, Google is not going to be bothered about supporting it.
There’s probably other reasons I’ve not thought of, but just a couple of the above are enough to explain it IMO
Google isn’t exactly excited about the concept of local files. They would prefer you to keep everything in their online services.
If you need support for these, then installing a separate file manager app is your best bet.
I’m using this one: f-droid.org/packages/me.zhanghai.android.files/
(No idea, though, if it supports unpacking RAR archives.)
Not really. Safest place to get an app is from the Dev if you’re not using the play store. FDroid has been known to host out of date packages forever, causing security concerns.
Are you sure the GitHub releases aren’t being updated anymore? When I checked here not too long ago, they were still being updated. I know they said they changed the positaries, but I don’t know how long ago that was. But I know for a fact that I was able to pull Firefox focus version 122 off of GitHub.
Fennec 127 on fdroid. Now that I think about it, I believe I did see a post the other day about Mozilla completing a move to some other system. Let me see if I can find it.
Edit: Here it is, though I’m not sure if this will help at all. But it may at least explain something.
I’m afraid I don’t have any real solution, since I get Firefox from the play store, but its my secondary browser; I get Mull from Obtainium (kinda like a Librewolf for android), you might look into that? I know this is kind of not what you wanted to hear though and im sorry
A lot of our issues were due to the growing pains of our host who, don’t get me wrong, promptly responded and fixed issues as they popped up. The big reason we stuck with him is because he went to bat for us when someone did their typical crybully shit and tried to go above us and get us censored by our ISP despite the infringing content being completely legal in the country that the host is in.
I highly recommend kyun.host for this very reason because they will promptly tell any complainer to fuck off so long as the host they’re complaining about isn’t doing anything illegal. It really is censorship resistant.
I’d get pinged all the time on our Matrix that the server is down or is slow and other stuff which caused the components of the server, namely pictrs to crash and exhibit undefined behavior, since our image storage host was accessed via an NFS share to a spinning rust server with more ample storage mounted through a Wireguard tunnel. With each server going down all the time, it’d cause Lemmy to seriously break and require a manual fix to get it going again. Over time, I’ve gotten kinda burnt out from maintaining the site and slowly just mostly stopped using it altogether aside from a cursory glance every now and again to make sure it was still working, due to my increasingly waning lack of interest in perusing the site.
If it wasn’t for the funding issues, this instance probably would’ve remained on the same path to being shutdown just at a later date, most likely. Just because it’s too much for one person to maintain given all these situations along with the software still being of a beta quality piling onto our already existing issues. And frankly, I don’t have fun using it anymore and honestly completely dread working on it.
I absolutely refuse to create an account on any of the popular instances, which would probably end up in a repeat of the Lemmy Admin Matrix room situation where I laughably got permanently banned on sight for “CSAM” even though I never posted any such thing, rofl. So I’ll leave this here, the hyperlink in that post references their Fediseer tool:
This is precisely another reason why I’m glad we’re shutting down, the threadiverse is so stifling that we have to be on our best behavior or else we get labeled through your dumb Fediseer tool. Sometimes wrongly, (IE: calling us bigots when we fully support the trans movement, as well as the overall LGBTQ movement as a whole, and any movement that’s focused on minorities.) labeling us as a bad instance. The fact that your tool doesn’t allow instances to opt out can create a completely slanderous situation if a clique of high profile instances decide that they don’t like you.
Burggit will live on in a frankly more fun microblogging fork of Misskey, called Sharkey in the wider fediverse. A big chunk of which, will not give two shits about the reputations passed down to instances by this tool wielded by a clique of popular Lemmy instances whose behavior would make a typical Reddit powermod blush, since it takes itself way less seriously: dill.burggit.moe
the strong-arm bullying by popular instances was easily the most annoying thing about the “Lemmy-verse”. The auto-defederate list that those instances controlled was an obvious example of power-mad witch-hunting people being in charge. I’ve even heard once or twice of smaller instances being forced by the popular instances to follow their rules and subscribe to the list if they don’t want to be added to the list themselves.
I share your sentiment that Sharkey has been much more relaxed and fun! Only a week after I started using it, I stopped caring if Lemmy Burggit would even come back online. The users are more playful and friendly, and there’s none of that circlejerk/hivemind moderation cult over there. it helps a lot that sharkey itself feels much better put together than lemmy does. so with that, I too say goodbye to Lemmy, and hello to Sharkey.
lemmy.comfysnug.space/post/305019 saw itself being forced to change its rules despite content falling within their scope not having been posted at all.
Going back on my, “This is the last post I’m making on Burggit.” Already apparently, lol. This was something that I thought of covering, but ultimately decided not to, since I thought the post was long enough as it is. Thank you very much for bringing this up.
kbin.burggit.moe
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