RAR

About RAR

My buddy Frank told me I needed this app after I emailed him a bunch of photos and they were too big to send. He sent me a link and told me to try it. I’m not what you’d call a tech wizard—I use my Pixel 7 for calls, emails, and looking up recipes mostly. But when I got this batch of family pictures from my daughter and they came as some weird file ending in .zip, I was lost. RAR made sense to me after a few clicks. It’s not fancy, but it works. I’ve been using it for about five weeks now, and I’ve opened maybe a dozen files with it. No complaints so far.

Core Features

The main thing RAR does is open compressed files. You know, those things that end in .rar or .zip. I never paid much attention to them before, but now I see them everywhere. The app also has a file browser built in, which I didn’t expect. I can look through my phone’s folders without leaving RAR, which is handy. It supports a bunch of formats like 7z and TAR, but honestly, I’ve only used RAR and ZIP. There’s also password protection stuff—I haven’t needed that yet, but Frank uses it for his tax documents. You can create archives too, which means squishing files down to make them smaller. I tried that once with a set of old vacation pictures, and it worked fine. The app even repairs damaged archives, but I haven’t run into that problem.

Real-World Use

Last Tuesday afternoon, I was sitting in my kitchen trying to open a file my daughter sent. It was a big collection of photos from her trip to the Grand Canyon, and she zipped them up. I tapped the file in my email, and it asked me what app to use. I picked RAR. The app opened up, showed me the list of pictures inside, and I hit extract. A few seconds later, all those photos were sitting in a new folder on my phone. Simple as that. Another time, I downloaded a free knitting pattern from a website, and it came as a .rar file. Same thing—opened right up. The only hiccup was when I tried to open something and it asked for a password. I had to call my nephew to figure out what the password was. That took a bit, but the app handled it fine once I typed it in.

Pricing & Value

RAR is free to download, which is nice. But there are ads. They pop up at the bottom of the screen sometimes, and once in a while, a video ad plays when I open the app. That annoys me a little, but I understand the developer has to make money. You can pay to remove the ads, and I think it’s a few bucks. I haven’t done that yet, but I might if the ads get worse. For what it does—opening files I can’t otherwise open—it’s worth the minor hassle. I’d rather pay a couple dollars once than deal with a subscription. There’s no subscription here, which I appreciate.

Updates & Support

I had one issue where the app crashed when I tried to open a big archive. It just closed on me. I contacted support through the app’s menu, wrote a short message, and waited. It took about three days to get a reply, which felt like forever. But the person who wrote back was polite and told me to clear the app’s cache. I did that, and it worked. So the support is decent, just not super fast. The app has updated twice since I got it, and each time it seemed to work a little smoother. I don’t track version numbers, but I noticed the file browser got a little quicker after the last update.

Data & Privacy

I’m not too worried about privacy with an app like this. It handles my files, but it doesn’t ask for weird permissions. RAR only needs access to my storage, which makes sense since it’s opening and saving files. It doesn’t ask for my contacts or location or anything creepy like that. I checked the privacy policy once, and it seemed straightforward—no selling my data to third parties. For a retiree like me who just wants to open family photos and knitting patterns, that’s good enough. I don’t keep super sensitive stuff on my phone, so I’m comfortable using it.