How to Open & Extract RAR Files on iPhone & iPad
Have a RAR file you need to open on iPhone or iPad? Did you receive a RAR file from one of your colleagues via email or any messaging platform? If you tried viewing it, you may have noticed that you’re unable to uncompress the file using the native Files app. Fortunately, there are other ways to view the contents of a RAR file on your iPhone.
The Files app of iOS and iPadOS allows users to uncompress and open ZIP files natively on their devices using the Files app, and to create zip files too. This makes managing compressed files a breeze until, you run into a RAR file, which is a proprietary file format developed by RARLAB. Due to its proprietary nature, you will not be able to extract RAR files natively on your iPhone or iPad (yet anyway, but perhaps down the road?). But, that doesn’t mean you’re out of luck.
Thanks to the bunch of third-party file manager apps that are available on the App Store, you have plenty of options to deal with the RAR format in iOS and iPadOS. Let’s take look at the options so you can learn how to open and extract RAR files on your iPhone and iPad.
How to Extract RAR Files on iPhone & iPad
To manage the RAR files, we’ll be making use of a very popular file management app called iZip. Make sure you download and install the latest version of iZip from the App Store before going ahead with the steps below:
- Launch iZip on your iPhone or iPad.
- Next, tap on “Document Browser” from the main menu of the app.
- This will launch the native file browser on your iPhone. You’ll be shown your recent files by default, but tap on “Browse” from the bottom menu to locate a specific file.
- Head over to the directory where the RAR file is stored and select it using the file browser.
- This will take you back to iZip with a message saying that the file has been imported. Tap on “Yes” to continue.
- Next, you’ll be shown a preview of the contents of the file. You’ll also get a confirmation prompt for unzipping the files. Tap on “OK”.
- The extracted files will show up in the app immediately. You can just tap on the files to view them individually.
That’s pretty much all you need to do.
As long as you don’t mind using a third party app, opening, extracting, and viewing RAR files on an iPhone or iPad is easy, even if the format isn’t natively supported by the Files app the way .zip files are.
Once extracted, you can save the extracted files in a desired location using iZip, which can then be accessed from the native Files app.
If you haven’t tried out the built-in decompression feature on iOS and iPadOS just yet, you may be interested in learning how to unzip files on your iPhone and iPad. Of course, iZip can be used to extract ZIP files too, but most people would prefer the native Files app for extracting these files unless a format isn’t supported.
iZip is just one of the many apps that are available on the App Store that can be used for managing and opening RAR files on your iPhone. Therefore, if you don’t like the ads or user interface of the app, you can always try out a different one. Just search for RAR manager on the App Store and check out the top results.
Hopefully, you were able to extract the RAR files you received without any issues. Did you find another solution for managing RAR files on the iPhone or iPad? Did you use another app to open and extract the archive? Feel free to share your experiences with iZip, or any relevant tips or perspectives in the comments section.
