Most people would not think twice about where their apps come from: they hear about a cool one that seems to meet their needs, go to the playstore, download, and voilà. A great and smooth experience, except for the part where nobody realized that it had them write off a bunch of functionalities they may need.
This is what happens for instance with your very own Kiwix, whose playstore version had to be throttled in order to meet Android’s sideloading requirements. And by requirements, we actually mean limitations.
You do not own your phone
One often fails to realize that the danger of putting one’s download decisions into the hand of an all-powerful quasi-monopoly is that one effectively delegates the power to decide what can sit on any given phone to this monopoly. And it appears that Google, for reasons it never really explained, is not too keen on people downloading files from outside of said apps.
This is both important and annoying because Kiwix users, in particular those running the Kiwix for Android app, often end up storing very large files: at 101GB the entirety of Wikipedia does fit on a medium-range phone, but let’s be honest this is a lot of data and not everyone can download it in one go, if only because that would mean standing within range of an internet connection. And if one can’t be mobile, well mobile phones do lose quite a bit of appeal.
So what people do is download Wikipedia on their computer, or borrow their zim files from someone who has already made the bandwith and time investment: transfer same zim files onto one’s device and voilà, you can have your cake zim and eat browse it.
Except that Google’s policies won’t let you do that. Your phone will not allow your sideloading zim files, period.
This is not the update you are looking for.
Fortunately, and unbeknownst to most, you don’t have to download an app from the playstore in order to be able to use it. Simply download the Kiwix APK and run it on your phone: this version is unrestricted, meaning that it will let you open whichever zim file meets your fancy, no questions asked. Great success!
Except that just like this Jason douchebag from Friday the 13th, Google’s grasp on your phone isn’t just dead yet.
From now on, every time we will publish an update onto the Playstore Android will recognize the same app on your phone and will want to update it (and replace it with its own limited version). Do we want this? Of course not! That would be going back to square one, with the infuriating bonus that your zim files would still me there but you would be unable to access them. The horror!
The solution, therefore, is to disable auto-updates, but only for Kiwix (for most online apps, it is good practice to always keep them updated). And here is how you will do it, courtesy of a very kind reddit user:
- Open the playstore app and select your profile at the top right
- Click on Manage apps & Device (first menu item)
- Click on the Manage tab
- Click on Kiwix
- Open the dot menu in the top right corner
- Unselect the Enable auto update button.
From then on, whenever the Kiwix is updated on the playstore, yours will not. We off course recommend you come and check it out regularly (and manually), but at least that will be your choice.