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.
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.
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.
I suspect that people just aren’t really downloading files to their phones any more, at least not in the conventional sense.
Mobile internet is less slow and choppy now
