Installing VLC via a play store

[EricS]

I have a problem installing VLC. When using Yalp, it says that the 2.0.6 version on the Google play store is not compatible with my phone (or the other way around ).

I can’t find it on FDroid but that doesn’t really surprise me because of all the non-open codecs.

Manually installing the arm7 2.5.9 version from the VLC website works fine.

My questions:

• Where does this incompatibility come from ?
• Is there a way to keep VLC up-to-date automatically ?
• Does anyone know why the version on the play store is so old ?

Thanks.

[BertG]

I have the VLC 2.1.20 and I got it via f-droid
The german computer magazine Chip links to this url for VLC for Android:
https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/videolabs/vlc/
Latest version is 2.5.9 beta (November 14, 2017) or 2.5.6 (October 20, 2017) as stable version.
As far as I know, for FP2 the arm-Version is needed.

[AnotherElk]

https://forum.f-droid.org/t/where-is-the-vlc-app/108

[Roboe]

@EricS

I can’t find it on FDroid but that doesn’t really surprise me because of all the non-open codecs.

VLC is free software. Including codecs. Last time I checked, F-Droid could not build VLC app because their toolchain didn’t meet some dependencies requirements from Videolan. With the @AnotherElk link we can see that VLC’s source is a little nightmare too to work with.

@EricS

Where does this incompatibility come from ?

Installing a previous version is not possible. If you have a >2.1.x version already installed, you cannot install 2.0.6 from the Play Store.

Other possiblity is the following. Different builds of the same app from different developers are not compatible (because of the Android’s security model, which is a “trust first, distrust the rest”). For example, F-Droid team build each app from source, in a similar way than Debian or Ubuntu, but you cannot install a Videolan’s VLC build on top of a F-Droid’s VLC build. Usually apps distributed in the Play Store are the same as apps distributed as APK on the app’s website, but it doesn’t have to be that way always. So, you have a VLC build from F-Droid or other installed, or this is a weird and uncommon case where APKs doesn’t match.

@EricS

Is there a way to keep VLC up-to-date automatically ?

It doesn’t seem like it. Website lists version 2.5.9, Play Store 2.0.6 and Amazon Marketplace 2.1.x.

@EricS

Does anyone know why the version on the play store is so old ?

It seems like VLC developers are not keeping VLC’s market entries up-to-date.

[Roboe]

Yesterday I got a new VLC update from Play Store (through Yalp Store). It is the 2.5.13 release.

To me it seems that they publish some edge releases on their website for testing, and after some time promote some of them as stable enough and upload them to Play Store.

P.S.: Publishing through marketplaces take time because your app needs to be approved by the technical (and legal) teams of the marketplace. That’s why some developers/teams release only stable versions of their apps to this channels.