VLC team: media player block on Huawei smartphones was lifted months ago

The team behind VLC says based on a message from Android Police that VLC can be downloaded again on Huawei smartphones via the Play Store. This has been the case for several months now. Last year, several phones were removed from the whitelist.

Android Police reports that it has heard from Huawei users that VLC is back on their phones. Owners of the P20 Pro, P30, Mediapad M5 and the Mate 20 can download VLC again via the Play Store. VideoLan, the organization behind VLC, says Huawei fixed its firmware a while ago and that VLC was made available again the following day. Neither company has published anything about this.

In the summer of last year, VideoLan’s developers decided to block it because the Android system on recent Huawei devices has an aggressive policy against apps running in the background. This is probably done to limit power consumption, but it would also prevent VLC from playing audio when the screen is turned off. The VLC team then indicated that the P8, P10 and P20 could no longer download the video app from the Play Store and redirected users to the apk on their site.