How to Unzip Files on an iPad
In 2020, Apple revealed that it had sold over 500 million iPad units. The iPad’s operating system and technology have seen leaps forward since the first release, with Apple striving to make things more streamlined. When it comes to one of the most popular archive types, figuring out how to unzip files on an iPad was one of the things that became a lot easier.
It’s almost a certainty that zip files are here to stay, considering it’s still one of the most popular compression types. There are numerous desktop solutions for managing zip archives, but most of the marketing focus is on desktops. For most iPad owners, this won’t be an issue anymore.
Apple first introduced official support for managing zip archives in iOS 11 back in 2017. Since then, the mobile operating system has had the native ability to handle the archive type. It’s not something that most users will have dealt with in daily use, though.
Before that, you would have needed a third-party app to handle unzipping the archive. Assuming you’ve got a version of iOS that supports the file type, you can go through the following steps to get at your files.
If you want to how to zip and unzip files on an iPad, keep reading!
Open the Files App
First up is to navigate to the Files app. It’s the icon with the blue folder, and clicking on it will bring up a simplistic file manager that lets you move between folders on your iPad.
Presented to you will be a list of locations on the right-hand side of the screen. If you’ve downloaded the compressed file, the place you’ll be looking for is the ‘Downloads’ folder. You can press it to go to that folder, where you’ll then see the downloaded archive.
It’s worth mentioning this step in particular because there’s a chance that the file may not decompress from the downloads folder. If that’s the case, you’ll have to press and hold the file, then drag it over to the ‘On My iPad’ folder.
Keep that in mind as we move on to the next step.
Decompress the Archive
The choice of decompression methods will spoil you with two options. One is a little fancier, and the other is nice and easy.
If you want to go with the easy method, all you need to do is tap the file once, and a new uncompressed folder should appear with the same name as the archive. If you want to get a little crazy, tap and hold the archived file to make a menu appear, then tap ‘Uncompress’ at the bottom!
Either way that you decide to do it, that’s it! All done! The folder and files should be sitting there awaiting your exploration.
What if You Want to Zip Instead?
If somebody has asked you to zip it, chances are they aren’t asking you to be quiet and instead want you to compress something to an archive. Maybe you want to add the files you just unzipped after you’ve modified them.
Figuring out how to zip files on an iPad is almost as easy as unzipping them. It’s not that different or more complicated than the unzipping process for a single folder. All you need to do is tap and hold the folder then you’ll get the option at the bottom to compress.
Compressing multiple files or folders is a little trickier, as you have to tap the select button in the top left corner before compression. After you’ve got everything selected, tap the ‘More’ button on the bottom right to reveal the compression option.
Help, This iPad Runs iOS 10 or Older!
Well, that’s a little bit more problematic. An unfortunate reality for anybody on an older iPad is there’s no native support for zip files. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, however.
Your best bet in this situation is to have a look around the Apple app store for a third-party tool that can do the job for you. The tricky part here is that many app developers will keep their apps updated for the latest version of iOS.
There’s a handy guide here on grabbing older versions of apps that might help you out if you get stuck in this situation.
It’s a little more awkward, but another idea is to download the file to a desktop computer and unzip it there before transferring it to the iPad. Most desktop and laptop computers will handle zip files, so figuring out how to unzip files on Mac machines shouldn’t be too difficult.
Why Will This Zip File Not Open?
If you’ve just downloaded an archived file, but none of the above instructions are helping, then you might want to double-check that it’s a zip file. Zip isn’t the only archiving format, but it’s one of many that also happens to be the most popular.
One of the other archive types is a RAR file. If you can’t get the file in zip format, then you’re going to have to pursue some more complicated workarounds. You see, there’s no support for the RAR file type in either iOS or on a desktop Mac because it’s closed proprietary.
If you feel a determination to open it on the iPad, you’ll be in a similar situation as before. You will be facing an inability to extract the file without a third-party app.
If you’ve got access to a Mac, you could always try heading over to https://setapp.com/how-to/open-rar-files-on-mac, where they’ll let you try their software for free.
How to Unzip Files on an iPad
We hope that you’ve got a better idea of how to unzip files on an iPad now. If you feel like you’ve learned a thing or two, then you’ll love the rest of the blog.
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