It's been a bit of a nightmare week for torrent-based movie and TV streaming service Popcorn Time. After a number of the core development team had decided to leave the project due to the threat of possible legal action, additional problems started to occur with the application's domain name, which has resulted in the main Popcorn Time fork being pulled offline permanently and being entirely inaccessible to anyone wanting to use the service.
After some of the apps bundled in the uTorrent installer were flagged as malware by anti-virus software, the people behind the BitTorrent client have started to explore other ways of making money, though it would seem that they aren't yet sure exactly what that will look like.
The legality of Popcorn Time has been questioned on umpteen occasions, but those behind the development of the free-to-use service have remained dedicated to its development. In fact, over the past few months alone, it has spawned apps across several platforms, yet while iOS users are accustomed to being served before anyone else, the opposite has been true in this instance. Today, though, Popcorn Time has added support for Apple TV via AirPlay in the Windows app, with support in Mac app coming soon, and along with it, the promise that an iOS version is on its way and will become available very soon.
Usually, the utility of torrent downloaders remains limited to desktop computers, and the concept of downloading torrents on smartphones and even tablets remains somewhat alien. The whole idea of grabbing torrent based content on the move also gets bogged down by the fact that there isn’t much variety of torrent clients available for major smartphone platforms, such as iOS, Android and Windows Phone.
Torrenting is one of the primary ways internet users snatch their digital content. Whilst most of the media available on the top public sites falls on the wrong side of the law in terms of copyright infringement, the actual act of downloading and seeding torrents is perfectly legal and accounts for a high portion of bandwidth use.
Apple has never been too keen on BitTorrent clients, blocking every single one from ever reaching the App Store. But even if you don't want to jailbreak your phone, there's a way around this restriction, and best of all, it's totally free!
After Apple relaxed its App Store restrictions, the first of apps that benefitted from this were Google Voice clients (like GV Connect and GV Mobile+) and just now, a BitTorrent-based torrent managing app called IS Drive has been approved for the App Store.
uMonitor is a uTorrent client app for iPhone and iPod touch which lets you monitor your torrent files being downloaded through uTorrent on a Windows PC or a Mac.
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