VLC today announced that it has blacklisted the latest smartphones from Huawei on the Google Play Store from downloading the VLC media player. The team behind the popular open source media player has taken this decision due to Huawei’s “ridiculous policy of killing all background apps” which ends up breaking background audio playback in VLC.

Huawei and a few other OEMs are known to aggressively kill background apps so as to improve performance and battery life of their devices. However, this ends up having a negative effect on the performance of many apps and affects their functionality as well.

PSA: @HuaweiMobile phones are now blacklisted and cannot get VLC on the Play Store.
Their ridiculous policy of killing all background apps (except their own) breaks VLC audio background playback (of course).
See https://t.co/QzDW7KbV4I and many other reports…@HuaweiFr

— VideoLAN (@videolan) July 25, 2018

VideoLAN only says that only recent Huawei smartphones will not be able to download VLC from the Play Store, though it fails to mentions their name.

The developers behind VLC are not the first one to have raised their voice about Huawei’s aggressive memory management practices in Emotion UI. Other developers have also complained about this issue before, though their complaints have made little difference to Huawei’s behavior.

If you own a Huawei smartphone and cannot find the VLC app on the Google Play Store, you can still sideload the APK yourself.

Our Take

Software has always been one of Huawei’s weak point and its aggressive memory management of background apps is an example of that. While it makes sense for an OEM to kill or freeze background apps that drain a lot of battery, Huawei’s Emotion UI ends up killing almost all third-party apps running in the background thereby affecting their functionality negatively.

By naming and shaming them, VLC is hoping to create enough noise about this issue that it forces Huawei to change its stance on the matter.