Android still doesn't support many compression types
When w11 announced that they were adding native support for rar, 7z, etc, it occurred to me that android also doesn’t support these and I found it really weird
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.)
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