How to Use Blacklisted VLC App on Huawei Smartphone
VideoLAN and Huawei are fighting. So much so that you can no longer get the always popular multifunctional VLC media player app from the Google Play store on Huawei smartphones – the core variant of VideoLAN. But you can still download the VLC .APK directly from VideoLAN and you should … with some modifications.
According to the president of the company, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the reason for the blacklisting of VideoLAN is simple:
“Huawei devices are now prohibited from downloading VLC. We’re tired of their OS breaking VLC all the time. Huawei basically kills VLC on screen off. So it kills VLC when it plays sound in the background. “
Ryan Uitvam of Android Police notes that this is “shockingly aggressive management of applications” does not seem a problem if you are using a version on the Android Nougat EMUI shell of not less than 5.1. If you are using an old version of EMUI that seems to be used by a fair amount of people (and then blow up the VLC app with negative reviews in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store), your experience of watching movies or listening to music will be greatly diminished. be embarrassing because of your smartphone’s default settings.
While VideoLAN is working with Huawei to solve this problem, there are several workarounds that you can use to watch or listen to movies and music without any problem.
First, you need to visit the VideoLAN website on your Huawei device, download the VLC .APK and open it to download to your device. You may need to allow installation from Unknown Sources first in the Security section of your Settings app.
After that, you might have to dig a little to find other settings you want to tweak:
- Go to Settings> Battery, click the three-dot icon , click Optimize Battery, select All Apps from the drop-down menu, find VLC and switch it to Don’t Optimize.
- As this Reddit commenter points out, this list of apps can also be buried under Settings> Apps> Settings (gear icon)> Special Access> Ignore Optimization. (You will find a screenshot of the walkthrough here .)
- It is also possible that your device has a list of “protected apps” under the Power Saver section of the Phone Manager app or the Battery or Battery Manager section of the Settings app.
Again, I don’t have a Huawei smartphone, but that probably won’t help much considering that different versions of EMUI work on different Huawei smartphones. In general, you will want to find any way to disable the power or battery optimization features for applications on your smartphone, as well as any way you can whitelist or “protect” certain applications from automatically shutting down Huawei.
First of all, make sure your device has the latest Android and EMUI from Huawei. This could fix your VLC problems right away while you wait for VLC and Huawei to work on an official fix, or at least an in-app help that lets you tweak your smartphone’s battery settings when you first load VLC.