VLC - App stores were a mistake

Reminder that VLC is on F-Droid

Fdroid is the obvious answer me thinks. Anyway love you guys/gals at videolan still haven't come across a piece of software that destroys every other in its field in every aspect.

Dear VLC, in your download section there is the F-Droid app store option which I consider a good thing. p.s. Why are you still posting on Twitter ??? On your website I see two buttons Facebook and Twitter. Time for a change ?

By the way, archive.is and archive.ph are Tor unfriendly. Another link : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39798565

VLC is still on Twitter? I thought they would be quick to migrate to Mastodon, slightly disappointed.

And thanks OP for linking outside of Twitter.

and yet the fdroid version was updated last month!

TIL that my country has bended over the copyright trolls and blocked Archive.is, need a VPN to view...

For people lost in dessert:

• https://www.gizchina.com/2024/03/24/lack-of-updates-for-vlc-android-app-with-100-million-downloads/
• https://www.fikrikadim.com/2024/03/23/vlc-and-google-at-odds-whats-causing-the-update-block.html

So, uh, why not? The link doesn't answer that.

I don't think app stores are the problem. I think big company app stores are the problem, such as the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. I think something like F-Droid where you can add your own app sources or Droid-ify that has a ton of sources by default you just need to enable is the way to go.

Can someone break down the thinking behind this?

With Play App Signing, Google manages and protects your app's signing key for you and uses it to sign optimized, distribution APKs that are generated from your app bundles

You can use google's play app signing. It's not mandatory.

I wonder why people make vague claims like that and expect us to support them without really understanding the issue.

Feel for these guys.

Also, install MPV. It's been absolutely nailing the "just play stuff" niche better than VLC for over a decade while being only a fraction the size and complexity. VLC's fully committed to bloattown these days.

I've scrolled through the F-Droid repositories in Droidify app and see that VLC does not have their own F-Droid repository ? They could create one, and set up mirrors for it, think of a way to cover the hosting costs, why not ? Making yourself depend on Apple and Google and saying that app stores were a mistake feels wrong.

Reading this I remembered that stupid apple is now forced to let us sideload on iphones. I just kicked off the ios update to enable it.

i love how google is not even trying to hide the fact that they are engaging in obvious extortion

"give us the keys to all your secrets so that we can secretly inject NSA malware, or be setenced to obscurity"

anyway this is what we get when we trust gargantuan multi billion corpos not to royally fuck us over

But why is fdroid so behind?

Okay, but are they still releasing updates via other channels? The newest version on their website is 3.5.4, the same that I got through the play store.

same thing for linux. their repo's latest version is 1.16 while their github version is 2.4.

Edit: my version numbers are wrong but you get the idea. The repo's version is like 20 releases behind

Oh, then it has no purpose then

Feel for these guys.

Also MPC has been better for ages.

So install and updated it without going through the store apps ... you can download all the installers directly from their website. Absolute non-issue.