VLC is blacklisting recent Huawei devices to combat negative app reviews | Hacker News Reader

VLC is blacklisting recent Huawei devices to combat negative app reviews

theverge.com

115 pointsWingman4l778 comments

I work in a role where a bunch of Huawei devices have been deployed to non-technical end users for a particular business purpose (against my advice).

This doesn't surprise me in the slightest -- the overzealous and frankly capricious changes in their Android firmware are ridiculous and difficult to mitigate.

Sure, let's issue a comm. that says "everyone change this setting so your device will work properly". What level of adoption can be expected from that? (hint: not much)

The scenario listed here is exactly why we need to promote and support efforts toward open firmware for Android devices, or at the very least, don't compensate vendors/manufacturers that use the Android platform to slather crap across an OS that works fine without all the additional and superfluous BS.

Another clickbaity title not giving the whole story... "Huawei killing apps; devs blamed" would have been better. If a phone was crashing your apps and users blamed you (and rated your app as such), what would you do?

I trust the VLC team so I gave them the benefit of the doubt before even clicking, I completely agree. The title should reflect that this is in response to Huawei firmware changes.

I think the only other reasonable thing that could be done is automatically responding to the one star reviews. Maybe work with Google to remove the reviews, but these things take time and may not work. I have a hard time finding a problem with what the devs have done here.

Also, I believe developers on the Play Store can set flags for device compatibility anyway, no? Or is that limited to specs and OS version? It makes sense that if an application is known to not work properly on a given device, it might throw the "not compatible with your device" message on the app listing.

The fact that they still offer it as a direct download shows that they aren't solely trying to stop people from using it, but rather they know of the issues and don't want to claim full compatibility.

Break news! Team uses filtering feature of Play Store to avoid installing app on devices where it doesn't work!

How much of this should be blamed on Google? iOS only allows certain types of apps to run in the background unfettered - audio, navigation, Bluetooth communications apps (like the Pebble) and third party calling apps. Other types of apps can be periodically awakened by the OS (background app refresh), but the OS decides how often they can be awaken based on the frequency of interaction and a few other heuristics. In low power mode, apps that do background app refresh don’t get CPU time(?) and you can control which apps allowed to run in the background.

This allows the OS to distinguish between apps that always need to work in the background and those that don’t. The only drawback is server type apps. While VLC will keep playing audio in the background, I don’t believe the http server that allows you to copy media over a web interface to your phone will work over an extended period of time unless you’re playing audio at the same time.

Android 8 adopted this style of backgrounding a year ago. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/android-8-0-oreo-tho...

The issue with Android, is that Google never breaks backwards compatibility. Android also has improved security permissions but it’s voluntary for apps to adopt it.

VLC follows all Google recommendations, including for Oreo 8 compatibility. We rewrote our background service exactly for that.

That wasn’t meant as a knock against VLC at all. But it does say more about Huawei that they indiscriminately kill background apps without taking simple things into account like - is the app playing audio and is it being a good citizen.

No, Google regularly updates the minimum targetSdkVersion required for an app published to the Play Store. It maintains backwards compatibility for sideloaded apps.

https://developer.android.com/distribute/best-practices/deve...

That hasn't actually happened yet.

It may not crash, but google does not preserve backwards compatibility. I just spent 2 weeks doing a GPS system only to find out that it doesn't work on Android Oreo + and I had to totally rewrite it. You can call my GPS idea a bad one, but you can't say that google preserves backwards compatibility. Background services have changed drastically and your old code simply doesn't execute on new versions.

Google will very soon force app to target the latest API level, making them adopt all the new background restrictions.

Huawei has massively cranked up the battery optimization to a degree much greater than what Google does. I listen music in the background all the time on my Pixel with zero issues. If I pause the music for ten minutes or so it gets killed. Google can always improve memory management but this one is definitely more on Huawei.

> How much of this should be blamed on Google?

All of it and even more. The Google Play search is abysmal, there is no way to filter out applications that require many strange permissions. Now all applications require any permission they can think of and ad networks are happy with that.

Wow, what a terrible strategy for saving battery. Let's just send our customers back to 2009, when you had to keep your Pandora app open so your music wouldn't stop.

Making a mental note to never buy a Huawei.

Especially ridiculous considering the advancements in fast chargers that we have now for newer phones.

Ha, I had the same problem on a Lenovo phone, except I knew it was not a VLC issue because the process-kill would happen with any app I would leave running in the background. The most annoying part was that even after tweaking the battery/power settings this would still happen. Lesson learnt, don't buy Lenovo.

I'm not sure how much of it was about the 1 star reviews as much as it was anger at Huawei's "optimization".

I am observing the same "killing" of background service for Signal app too. Basically any app with a long-running session which you don't whitelist. And it seems that it whitelist the Spotify for example on its own. I don't think the blocking install by VLC team is the right way, communicating the issue to a user is a much more reasonable way. Look at Garmin Connect app, which had the same issue but they implemented notification and how-to disable management.

That is normal. An application that requires the background "foreground" service to run is obligated to display a notification and call an Android foreground service API in the service itself. Unless it is lower target SDK than 23 (number may be wrong).

Android 8 has doze but it's not a problem for VLC:

Android 8 Doze: apps can be blacklisted so that they don't get killed, API: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42651399/3422837

Huawei adds a very aggressive background app killer, this means that apps like VLC and WhatsApp don't work in background. I have a low end Huawei device for testing purposes (hint hint), there is a setting to whitelist apps from huawei's appkiller but they get killed anyway.

This is on iOS but their app definitely went downhill pretty severely in the past year.

If any sort of bluetooth or background playback is involved, the previous playback position will almost always be lost. Video/audio in a playlist skips and don't play sequentially. Reordering items manually will have their order re-scrambled as soon as you start scrolling the item list in the playlist. Playing an item to completion even in foreground will show a random amount left on this item when you moved onto another item.

It's hard to say Huawei is exclusively to blame when their primary video playing features (including background playback) is already so buggy.

Also on iOS, and I wonder if anyone else has experienced a weird bug. Open VLC, make sure it’s showing your videos as a grid, then drop your iPad about 3 feet onto a bed or other very soft surface (I am not responsible for you not picking a soft enough landing area). VLC gives me the “Report a bug” dialog box.

This is probably a shake to report a bug feature (Android users are probably more used to this, I remember Google Maps on Android having this feature)

Is there some reason to implement it on iOS? It also is really damn touchy.

Smaller codebase? I expect the iOS and Android branches share a fairly decent amount of code.

This is a pretty common pattern on Android. Sometimes accompanied by a message like "You seem to be shaking the device in frustration, report a bug?"

Where the response from me has always been, "No, I wasn't frustrated, I was running. But now I'm frustrated."

Onedrive on ios has a “shake to send feedback” but it can be disabled on the onedrive’s setings menu. I cant see the same on vlc and i couldnt reproduce the effect. maybe its the version you have? it may share some framework or library with this feature enabled by default (pure speculation i admit).

> This is on iOS but their app definitely went downhill pretty severely in the past year.

The VLC/iOS is getting a full rewrite, to be way more modern. (I can share screenshots if you want). So the transition is a bit difficult now, I agree, but it will be soon better.

> It's hard to say Huawei is exclusively to blame when their primary video playing features (including background playback) is already so buggy.

The code on iOS and Android is totally different. But Huawei is breaking all apps, including Google Photos or PodCast Addict. This is not VLC, but all apps that are affected.

Please do share screenshots.

Huawei and Xiaomi are both culprits of background app killing, and unlike Google they don't provide a way for apps to whitelist themselves.

> Please do share screenshots.

Of?

I completely agree with aggressive background killing, because too many apps are abusing their permissions and try every trick in the book to siphon user data at all times.

That being said, killing an app that is actively playing audio is not the best idea and an open source app with 100 million installs should probably be whitelisted anyway.

Blacklisting or just not supporting those device types and therefore preventing users using it?

Tweet says users can download apk so it's just they can't get it off Google Play. Users basically will get a message it's not compatible with their device hence they can't review the app.

Which sounds exactly like 'We won't support that device'. You can work around it, but you're on your own if anything goes wrong.

Yeah, it's a blacklist for "general public" but those adventurous or ones who can support themselves can try. Quite modest approach I think.

It does not sound like "therefore preventing users using it," though.

Yep. Unsupported, but not 'blacklisted'.

It is a blacklist at the Google Play level, not at the apk level. The devices are supported, as evidenced by the advice to download the apk directly.

There are several ways to blacklist device: - via Google Play, you have a list of all the device your apk is supposed to support. You can blacklist some of them, which won't be able to install the app, despite being otherwise supported - at the apk level (Android Manifest), by requiring hardware capability (for example, a camera, a phone, screen size ...) but not by specific model - obviously, you can detect the model after install and do a custom blacklist that prevent the user from actually using the app

VLC only used the first method, as a way to avoid those models from reviewing the app, because they were leaving disproportionate negative reviews.

That's a very sensible move if you ask me.

Just code it right ? I don't find those negative reviews on other background music players like spotify, so I imply that they work fine on those devices. I don't think they pushed an update just for two devices, I think it just worked with huaweis background killing. If VLC is not working on those devices, they deserve the negative reviews.

or huawei has a whitelist of apps not to mess around with, and spotify is on it but vlc isn't.

Rather than blacklist, I think a better approach is for VLC app to inform Huawei users about its quirky behavior on first run after installation and after every update. That way, Huawei users are unlikely to take the trouble of leaving a low rating for an app, and are better informed to choose a device next time. If background audio is something you can't do without, don't choose Huawei - that should be the messaging. That can help kick the company too into improving its firmware.

On a different - but related note - Huawei recently announced that they won't provide bootloader unlocking anymore for any device[1]. Although I own an Honor and like its hardware and software, I think Huawei is setting itself up to become an increasingly "bad player" in the device space in future. I'm wary of buying a Huawei again.

[1]: https://www.xda-developers.com/huawei-stop-providing-bootloa...

Could just as easily be counter productive. Some user who's just spent a few hundred on a new Huawei installs VLC and all their other old apps. VLC tells them their choice will lead to strange behaviour. User leaves 1 star review that VLC told them their new phone was crap.

Users barely read error messages and dialogues so there's no scope for any nuance in explaining and informing.

Blocking seems the only rational approach to take. Those who can understand sideloading can likely decide if they want VLC warts and all on their Huawei.

You aren't kidding. Users are shitty and capricious in the mobile space (sometimes everywhere, but very frequently the mobile space). I've had users leave one-star reviews for my mobile app--which controls OBS, a video mixer--with the reason "it works for 20 minutes [ed.: there is a very visible timer the entire time] and then stops [ed.: it goes readonly, it doesn't kill a stream or recording] and asks you to pay [ed.: five whole dollars]."

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