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• RAR is an outdated format and in decline at this point, there are better options to add before getting to it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

We’re talking about Android, unrar doesn’t have anything to do with this really.

RAR is and will continue to be a proprietary format with an owner who can seek royalties.

It’s like saying Google should stop licensing MPEG because ffmpeg exists—it simply doesn’t work like that

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.

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 suppose you’d fall into my “you’d install a file manager app if you actually needed it” category

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

That’s a weird emoji to use for elixir

GIGO

You don’t need to be skilled in something to get enjoyment out of it

Likewise you don’t necessarily get enjoyment out of something just because you’re skilled in it.

BunG-man

You can always configure the DNS manually on a device you own to ignore the DHCP settings sent from the router and just go directly to the pihole, obviously not as good as it happening automatically, but a good workaround if that’s not possible

Okay thanks, I hope he’s doing okay, I’ll update my comments

I’m sorry mate

Edit: okay this is disputable (see above thread), wait for more news

Edit 2: looks like he’s still alive (source elsewhere in the comments)

… He has

Edit: fuck…

Edit 2: okay this is disputable, wait for more news

Edit 3: looks like he’s still alive (source elsewhere in the comments)

Holy shit, I wasn’t expecting to find out like this

Edit: looks like he’s still alive (source elsewhere in the comments)

So the main software is here https://pi-hole.net/ (and they have good documentation, so I’m not going to repeat the nitty-gritty here)

You obviously need something to run it on, which could be some existing computer that’s always on, but (as the name might suggest) a lot of people use some form of Raspberry Pi (or similar) single-board computer.

Pihole will run on basically anything, so you can get an ancient pi and it will still run fine

I’m sorry, are you telling me you’re only subscribed to around 10 communities?!

I’m getting close to 1,500 😳

Gyms are the worst for it, a friend of mine was recently told they had to come in person to cancel—they were planning to move to a different part of the country, so then had to make a pointless trip to the gym instead of spending that time packing.

Yeah I think there’re a few names I’ve started to recognise as regulars.

Not sure if they’re literally in every thread or if I just have a load of interests cross over with them

I don’t know if this is a new meme format or not, but I’ve enjoyed seeing it on my feed today