I remember when I was younger, Download managers were talked about as a preferable thing to have installed, so downloads would be handled consistently/faster, especially with slow and choppy internet back then.
I realized today, that I haven’t really used one in a long time on my phone.
What happened?
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Folks realized that most of them were malware or adware. And that they were never actually necessary.
Yep, ever since I saw them in popups on hosting sites or gatekeeping downloads behind some shady .exe, I’ve associated them with malware and adware.
Firefox still has a habit of failing on large files so I used Aria2 for a while, seemed to work better.
But generally downloading large files is more of a laptop job for me so I don’t really need it
I mean, there’s still some download managers around, for example:
- https://f-droid.org/packages/com.gianlu.aria2app
- https://f-droid.org/packages/com.tachibana.downloader
But yeah, I imagine this functionality is now largely integrated into the apps that want to trigger the download. The advanced downloading functionality can just be a library and then the respective apps just need to strap a UI on top.
The only real advantage of a dedicated app, is that the other app’s APK size can be smaller, which isn’t too big of a deal anymore.
Android? I’m know I’m old but the only time download managers were useful was when we used dial-up and unreliable internet connections. And Android was not around then.
I used GetRight at the end of the 90ies but it stopped being necessary when I got DSL. I never even used one on Android because it wasn’t needed.
Mobile internet is less slow and choppy now
I suspect that people just aren’t really downloading files to their phones any more, at least not in the conventional sense.
