Ah fair play, I didn’t realise unrar was from the same guy, cheers for the extra context.

So I guess we go back to what else it could be:

• The licence could still be an issue as it’s not FOSS and parts of android are, so I guess that could prevent its inclusion if it’s incompatible with existing licences
• The licence could also be an issue in terms of wanting feature parity with zip support, which would include creation of archives.
• As I mentioned before, the percentage of users who are interacting with non-zip archives locally on their devices is a pretty small percentage. It may be on the backlog, but it’s not going to be far from the bottom in priority.
• How many of the use cases are not served by the third party app ecosystem sufficiently that it would benefit inclusion in the actual OS and the extra maintenance that would entail
• RAR is an outdated format and in decline at this point, there are better options to add before getting to it
• Let’s also address the elephant in the room regarding the last point—I don’t think I’ve seen RARs used regularly outside of piracy in quite some time. If that’s the main use case, Google is not going to be bothered about supporting it.

There’s probably other reasons I’ve not thought of, but just a couple of the above are enough to explain it IMO

We’re talking about Android, unrar doesn’t have anything to do with this really.

RAR is and will continue to be a proprietary format with an owner who can seek royalties.

It’s like saying Google should stop licensing MPEG because ffmpeg exists—it simply doesn’t work like that

And there’s not really any money to be made charging licenses to open source projects—see ffmpeg/vlc

Google including it in android though means they can charge licenses as a per unit fee because, basically, Google (or phone manufacturers) is a company with money.

I think a big part of it for RAR specifically is that it’s a proprietary format that would technically require Google to license it, and for the tiny percentage of users that would benefit, they don’t bother.

A seemingly random but relevant example is the Japanese travel card situation with Pixel phones—every pixel on the planet has the necessary hardware to support Japanese travel cards since the pixel 6, however only pixel phones bought in Japan can use the feature (locked by the OS) because it would mean Google would have to pay a per-device cost worldwide.

This is kinda a similar situation I’d bet, they’ve proven they would rather not include the feature than pay for licensing

I suppose you’d fall into my “you’d install a file manager app if you actually needed it” category

People don’t tend to need to browse local archive formats on their phones I guess, and if they do, they’ll have a file manager app with support.

There’s support for some formats if your files are in cloud storage like Google drive, which is a more likely use case for phone users

Even more odd is there being a Brit in charge of Amtrak

Isn’t there a single qualified American that cares about trains?

Everyone keeps telling me “you’ll understand when you’ve got one”

I’m thinking that’s a pretty irresponsible gamble

That’s a weird emoji to use for elixir

GIGO

…I feel like openssh has a much larger attack surface than a simple binary.

If you’re going to this extent already, you may as well jump on the run0 approach systemd is introducing.

oh no, I can hear rumbling

The internet has broken my brain.

scnr is a new one on me and in an attempt to figure it out, my brain did not land on the now rather obvious “sorry, could not resist” but “skibidi cap no rizz” as some kind of ironic initialism

I’m gonna go and find some grass now

You don’t need to be skilled in something to get enjoyment out of it

Likewise you don’t necessarily get enjoyment out of something just because you’re skilled in it.

*GDPArse

I’ll add to the other person who replied:

Most work in this industry is done in teams, if you can’t effectively communicate and get on with your team members, you’re gonna have a bad time.

It’s even baked into the hiring process everywhere I’ve worked, most of the time an organisation would prefer to take a lower skill candidate if they seem like they’d get on well with everyone Vs a highly skilled candidate that would rub people up the wrong way.

It’s a lot easier to fill gaps in engineering ability compared to coaching someone how to behave around people

I’m a software engineer

You’re not getting anywhere above entry level in this industry without social skills

Have you ever seen those videos of arbitrary code execution on a Gameboy with TAS tools? Where it spams every button for like 10 mins?

I’m now imagining a hypnotist flicking his pendulum around like it’s a yoyo

Apple is the manufacturer who makes the biggest hoo-ha over privacy, yet they gave user data to the police 90% of the time (Google was surprisingly lower at 80%)

Plus if you have a subscription to a mobile cellular network, as basically everyone with a phone does, that will also be constantly tracking you (and I believe also directly available to the police).

That’s all without going into whether you trust every single third party app on your phone and every website you visit.

As others have said it will likely be an ESIM or similar solution because there isn’t a need for the manufacturer to support physical SIMs.

Regarding being tracked though, Australia has ANPR just like most other developed countries, you will be trackable even if your car was just a Flintstones car with a numberplate.

I’d also add if you’ve got a phone in your pocket, that’s just as trackable

This always messed with me as a kid because for no reason I can come up with, xylophone made sense as the metal one and glockenspiel made sense as the wood one

It took more effort than it should to unlearn this