Folks realized that most of them were malware or adware. And that they were never actually necessary.

Firefox still has a habit of failing on large files so I used Aria2 for a while, seemed to work better.

But generally downloading large files is more of a laptop job for me so I don't really need it

I mean, there's still some download managers around, for example:

• https://f-droid.org/packages/com.gianlu.aria2app
• https://f-droid.org/packages/com.tachibana.downloader

But yeah, I imagine this functionality is now largely integrated into the apps that want to trigger the download. The advanced downloading functionality can just be a library and then the respective apps just need to strap a UI on top.

The only real advantage of a dedicated app, is that the other app's APK size can be smaller, which isn't too big of a deal anymore.

Android? I'm know I'm old but the only time download managers were useful was when we used dial-up and unreliable internet connections. And Android was not around then.

I used GetRight at the end of the 90ies but it stopped being necessary when I got DSL. I never even used one on Android because it wasn't needed.

I suspect that people just aren't really downloading files to their phones any more, at least not in the conventional sense.