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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Nope, unrar’s source code is free, released by RAR’s developer.
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.