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
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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.
People don’t tend to need to browse local archive formats on their phones I guess, and if they do, they’ll have a file manager app with support.
There’s support for some formats if your files are in cloud storage like Google drive, which is a more likely use case for phone users
I’m using a Samsung tablet that doesn’t support rar for example.
I suppose you’d fall into my “you’d install a file manager app if you actually needed it” category
Yeah but it’s still weird that there is no native support
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
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
Unrar is free enough.
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.
I keep pondering why Android has blobs for CIFS/SMB but not NFS, too.
Still haven’t found a legit reason why.
Because Windows is omnipresent and every NAS comes with SMB support out of the box.
