Today we live many limitations in mobile data traffic, something that will surely change in the future, but in the meantime we have to use all the possible tools to save our precious megabytes. One option is to compress files when you attach them to emails or share files , so we wrote this little tutorial on how to compress and decompress ZIP files on Android in an easy way .
In this tutorial we are going to use one of the best applications that we have found to manage compressed files and that is also free and without ads. We are talking about ZArchiver , which we found in the Google Play Store .
How to compress and unzip ZIP files on Android in an easy way.
Within the universe of compression formats, we find many compressed file formats (zip, rar, gzip, tar, 7z, cab and a long etc) , so it is inevitable to use an application to manage them. In Android we have the well-known official RAR application of the RARLAB developers, which works very well but is not free and does not support as many file formats as the application that we present today, ZArchiver .
When we started ZArchiver we did not find an interface very similar to that of a file manager , but we also noticed that it is specially designed for compression / decompression of files.
Let's review the formats supported by ZArchiver :
- Compression: zip, 7z (7zip), bzip2 (bz2), gzip (gz), tar and XZ.
- Decompression: rar, rar5, zip, 7z (7zip), tar, bzip2, gzip, XZ, iso, arj, cab, lha, lzma, lzh, xar, tgz, tbz, Z, zipx, mtz, rpm, dmg, deb , cpio, cramfs, img (fat, ntfs, ubf), chm, wim, arc (freearc) and ecm.
It also supports compression in volumes (split a file into several compressed parts) as long as the chosen format supports them. But the best thing about ZArchiver is its simplicity of use and speed, allowing access to compressed files in a matter of seconds.
It is true that there are file scanners that allow you to manage compressed files, such as Solid Explorer, but if you want a specialized application, ZArchiver is your best choice.