14 DAY TRIAL // People who used to reap the benefits of VLC for iOS and recently upgraded to iOS 8 were in for a surprise when they realized that the app had been automatically deleted from their phones post-update.
VideoLAN is saying nothing about the situation, and their popular video player is no longer to be found in the App Store. What to do?
Force it back onto your iDevice
If the scenario described in the paragraphs above sounds familiar, then you must be here trying to learn how to reinstall VLC back on your iPhone. It’s easy as pie, but you need to be sure you still have the .ipa file (the actual app that you downloaded from iTunes) on your computer’s hard drive.
To check, simply visit the Apps tab in the services menu in the left pane. It might require your iPhone to be connected to the computer to pop up, so do that. You’ll eventually need to anyway.
From there on, all you need to do is just drag VLC back onto your iPhone. If this is going too fast for you, don’t worry. We’ll break down the actual steps to make sure we’re not missing anything. Here we go.
Step 1
Connect your iPhone / iPad / iPod touch to your Mac or Windows PC.
Step 2
Look for the Apps section on the top left side of the iTunes window. It’s listed under Library. Click it and wait for your app icons to appear. If your last sync happened when VLC was still on your iDevice, you’re in luck. It’s still there somewhere. Look for its unmistakable icon and proceed to step 3.
Step 3
With your iDevice connected to iTunes, simply drag the VLC icon over to the Devices area (as shown in the screenshot above), where iTunes lists your phone and its contents. Drop it there and iTunes will automatically copy it back to the phone for you. Disconnect the device, unlock it, and look for the VLC app. It should be installed. That’s it!
If you don’t have the VLC .ipa file anymore
Some of you may not have the .ipa application file anymore. There’s no workaround for this, unfortunately. Not if you don’t want to jailbreak your device, and that’s something we’re not going to recommend.
Also worth noting is that the app doesn’t work as smoothly as it did before iOS 8 came along. Whether or not this is the actual reason behind its removal, we won’t know until VideoLAN or Apple decide to say something. Let us know how these steps worked for you.