Huawei

Huawei makes some great smartphones, but the company’s software has been an issue for a while. Especially for developers, these devices have caused a lot of headaches. This week, popular app VLC media player has decided to blacklist Huawei smartphones due to how those devices affect the app.

VLC media player is one of the most widely used apps on the market, on multiple platforms, for viewing local media. It works great, and the Android app has only been getting better over the years. However, Huawei’s devices haven’t played very nicely with it.

Announced on Twitter (via FrAndroid), VideoLAN has decided to blacklist Huawei smartphones from downloading VLC from Google Play. This decision was made due to the “ridiculous” way that their software handles background apps. As VideoLAN states, these devices are very aggressive with killing background activities from apps that are not from Huawei itself.

This causes a problem with VLC, as background play cannot work when the phone is killing the app. VideoLAN’s forums show users who have run into these issues on a regular basis, and a quick filter placed on Play Store reviews show other owners of their devices seeing the same problem.

The VLC app can still be loaded as an APK on affected devices, but until they change how it treats background activities, users likely won’t be able to download it from Google Play anymore. VideoLAN also notes that this only affects “recent” devices.

Huawei’s software has gotten a lot better over the years, but issues like this prove it still has a long way to go. I think this is a wise move from VLC as well, as users who download the app and run into this issue are usually quick to blame the developer and leave a poor rating, even though Huawei is the cause.