Anyone who happens to own a Mac will more than likely be familiar with The Unarchiver application that seems to be the de facto standard for uncompressing zip and other archived files. Other apps obviously exist but The Unarchiver seems to be able to handle any type of file that is thrown at it with minimal fuss. The Archives iOS application for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad has been created based on that OS X application and offers the same functionality, power and handling capabilities of its Mac based sibling.
Anyone who has a stock installation of iOS and regularly needs to deal with compressed files will more than likely be aware of the limitations of the said OS when attempting this process. Jailbroken devices can easily handle these file types thanks to additional software like iFile for iPhone, but stock users are sometimes frustrated at the lack of options available. This Archives app is a solution to that problem and can pretty much handle any archive format that are thrown at it.
Files that have been emailed to an account on the device or are hosted on the web can be uncompressed with relative ease using Archives. In addition to that, the application can even handle files from a computer thanks to the iTunes file sharing integration that ships with the software. One of the great and extremely helpful features of the app is that it allows the user to see a preview of the files inside of the archives as well as allowing additional applications to handle and open the contained files based on their format.
The power really comes from its ability to handle a large number of archive formats such as Zip, RAR, 7-zip, Tar and Gzip. In normal circumstances that would be enough to cover most of the formats in general use today, but older file types such as ARC, StuffIt and DiskDoubler are also handled by the app as well being able to recognize and handle ISO, BIN, CDI and self-extracting EXE files.
(Source: Archives for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch on the App Store).
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