Videolan locks VLC player for Huawei smartphones

With some models, you can not download the popular media player currently in the Play Store. The reason is the rigid management of Huawei's energy.

The developers of the popular VLC Player multimedia player have blocked their Android application for some smartphones from the Chinese manufacturer Huawei. Affected are currently the current models of the P10 and P20 families, a developer of the open source application said heise online. Owners of any of these smartphones can no longer download the app from the Google Play Store. However, you still have the option to download the application as a .apk package from the VLC home page.

Developers justify the move with poor app store ratings due to Huawei's battery management. Huawei smartphones do not allow applications to continue running in the background. As a result, the VLC player, for example, can no longer play music when the screen is locked or dark. Many users who do not know the battery management of their phone have apparently left negative reviews on the Play Store and reviews in the VLC forum.

Huawei Responds

VLC developers criticize Huawei for not having accepted the Exempter VLC Player for these strict limitations – this is possible and is also done for Huawei's own applications, for example. That's why they chose this drastic step. The choice of models justifies the developers with the fact that the owners of these smartphones are often often negative critics. But it could also be simply an attempt at public pressure on the manufacturer. Successfully: Meanwhile, Huawei reported to developers and a solution in sight. How exactly this might look, is not known yet.

Huawei provides its Android smartphones with its own EMUI interface, currently for new models Android 8 comes with EMUI 8. The Chinese manufacturer is known for its rigid energy management, which the user can only influence with special attention to the parameters. But it works, you can also teach a Huawei smartphone that the VLC can continue to play music. The necessary settings vary from one version to another, and several paths often lead to the goal. One can only try to experiment a bit with the settings.

The setting for "Ignore battery optimizations", for example, can be found under "Settings / Applications / Settings / Special Access". Under "Settings / Battery / Start", find the individual settings for individual applications. Here you can define whether applications can run in the background. You can also control whether the application can start itself or be started by another process.

(VBR)