I wanted to use it back in the day, but most instances didn't load. Even less often then regular Piped for me. I'd imagine that this wouldn't be particularly improved now that YouTube's doing their whole "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot" spiel
I've had issues with instances in the past too, but there's now a percentage next to each one displaying its uptime which I've found useful for stability.
There's a ton of advantages, but some very real disadvantages as well. No lsposed and incompatibility with certain magisk modules are probably the biggest for me personally.
None, for our holy Savior Daniel M'kay and grapheneOS have saved my soul. For even mentioning magisk I clearly deserve a public flogging, maybe even an execution. Obviously. RoOt iS iNsEcUrE
Sets himself up for the Grapheneos fanboys flogging. I'm using Grapheneos myself, and i agree they are not very... Tactful in addressing some specific usecases. I agree with the doctrine of not weakening the system, but an option should exist for people that understand the consequences, and still need a different use than the one envisioned by the developers. I'm not talking about root, there's more decisions that are made for you without your saying. For your safety. But still.
Using a device with no vendor-provided firmware security patches doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Also, the Pixel 8a gets 7 years of updates. That's plenty of time, and most people get a new phone after a much shorter time.
Calyx is pretty insecure by default, it removes some default AOSP security features and is very slow to push security patches. And it doesn't include any of the GrapheneOS security features like hardened SELinux, a hardened kernel, secure app spawning, hardened Chromium browser and WebView or hardware-based integrity attestation. It also uses a very flawed Google Play services implementation (microG) which requires root and has worse app compatibility.
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.
LineageOS kinda dead these last years they only do pixel phones. While the hoards of people using android are buying Samsung's and Xioami's budget phones
Edit: after reading the comments. I checked again and was surprised they have updated the list with newer models they weren't on the list a few months ago
How so? The devices page on the wiki lists 171 officially supported devices. I'm writing this comment on a Poco F3 running the official LineageOS 21 release...
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.
Unrar source may be used in any software to handle RAR archives
without limitations free of charge, but cannot be used to re-create
the RAR compression algorithm, which is proprietary. Distribution
of modified Unrar source in separate form or as a part of other
software is permitted, provided that it is clearly stated in
the documentation and source comments that the code may not be used
to develop a RAR (WinRAR) compatible archiver.
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: https://f-droid.org/packages/me.zhanghai.android.files/
(No idea, though, if it supports unpacking RAR archives.)
It's one of the most interesting new phones (at least for me). Moderate pricing, long support, good hardware. And probably many options like LineageOS or Graphene if you want a custom operating system.
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