12 ms·
Ask HN: Why doesn’t Apple allow torrent clients on the app store?
While torrent clients are often used for pirating, that’s not technically the stated purpose of the bittorrent protocol, it’s simply for P2P transfer of any files.
You could technically email pirated content to a large group of people too, doesn’t mean it would make sense for Apple to ban email apps.
Has Apple ever explained the justification for this?
- malux85 4y agoI used to work at a BitTorrent monitoring company, “often used for piracy” is a very favourable explanation. 99.9999% of torrent activity is piracy. My guess is that’s the reason.
- encryptluks2 4y agoBy that reasoning shouldn't encryption also be banned?
- altairprime 4y agoLess than 99.9999% of encryption is for piracy, so no, the reasoning isn’t transitive from torrenting to encryption.
- encryptluks2 4y agoBut near 100% of piracy uses encryption
- colordrops 4y agoNo, the vast majority of encryption is not used for illegal activity.
- BudaDude 4y agoOnly because the technology was pushed forward and adopted for the masses. P2P is used a lot of normal actives (Zoom, Discord, Games, Collaboration apps). It's just when it comes to sending large amounts of data, that Apple wants to have a say in it.
- newaccount74 4y agoI don't think Apple cares about sending data in general. Apple allows other P2P file sharing apps on the app store (Resilio Sync or Möbius Sync come to mind).
- frumper 4y agoFunny that you mention normal activities that are all allowed on Apple as examples of good P2P uses. Most of the sending large amounts of data P2P uses are illegal file sharing.
- colordrops 4y agoOh sure, I use torrent for legitimate things as well, e.g. Internet Archive downloads and Linux ISO image downloads, and don't think that Apple should ban the apps. I'm just pointing out that the analogy doesn't work.
- sieabah 4y agoAre you sure? VPNs probably carry that torrent traffic with encryption. Onion sites which carry the most illegal content on Earth also use encryption. Your reasoning is aligned with banning encryption because in all cases where something is illegal they tend to use some level of encryption.
- kube-system 4y agoWe are very very sure. HTTPS adoption across the web is at 95%. Onion and VPN traffic are rounding errors compared to the amount of traffic on the web.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y agoThe phrase used was "The vast majority" Consider the fact that every major website uses encryption in transit (HTTPS). Consider how much data Netflix streams to users. Those video streams are encrypted. I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of encryption is for protecting non-pirated and legal content.
- cronix 4y agoAnd everything on Netflix is also available, unencrypted, on torrent.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- vlod 4y agoMaybe you forgot that the communication to https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com is encrypted.
- throwaway14356 4y agothat is because you keep promoting it as such. In reality there is no piracy without a day in court.
- kube-system 4y agoIn reality, Apple isn't a criminal prosecutor.
- UnpossibleJim 4y agoMost game file transfers are torrent based, so if you've ever played an MMO you've been involved in a torrent. Definitely not piracy. This type of torrent transfer goes for a lot of updating processing as companies can't handle the bandwidth.
- sshine 4y agoDoes the App Store prohibit the use of a custom torrent client for downloading game data? This is a legitimate use-case for torrenting, but also one that does not warrant general-purpose torrent clients in the App Store.
- UnpossibleJim 4y agoI'm just going off of the statement %99.99999whatever of torrent use is for illegal purposes, which is a BS statistic.
- malux85 4y agoWe were monitoring 18.5 million torrents, over 292 million IP addresses, it took a Cassandra cluster of 18 nodes just to store this information. It was writing 18,000 writes a second, 24/7. This information was not pulled off pirate sites, it was sucked out of the distributed hash table directly. I singlehandedly wrote the code that did all of this, I have first hand knowledge of the entire system. Part of my job was also to analyse this data, I spent a year writing reports, clustering this info, generating realtime demand graphs and segmenting different media types. Just because you cherry pick some data about games distributed with bittorrent doesn't mean you can extrapolate entire network conclusions from that - that's first grade BS statistics right there Piracy was probably higher than 99.99999%. It's the vast, vast, vast majority
- WorldMaker 4y agoI've seen indirect evidence of custom torrent clients in games in the App Store. More directly: Resilio Sync is in the App Store and uses a variation of torrent tech for personal file sync. It can't be easily used as a general-purpose torrent client with its focus on personal sync.
- superkuh 4y agoApple doesn't believe in software that exposes their users to content outside of their walled garden.
- 4eleven7 4y agoApple doesn't believe in enabling illegal piracy, which is 99.9999999% of the usage of torrents. Twitter, web browsers, and YouTube are fine on the App Store.
- willcipriano 4y ago> enabling illegal piracy > YouTube Hmmm.
- sieabah 4y agoI've used torrents to download software so that the provider didn't need to pay bandwidth to share their software. There are completely legal and reasonable reasons torrenting exists. They're excellent at making huge downloads possible with the more efficient bandwidth. Instead of that, we have an ecosystem of "installers" that exist purely to download massive files to install.
- kube-system 4y ago
- chomp 4y agoFrom Apple: "... because this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights." Which isn't incorrect, because the overwhelming majority of Bittorrent traffic is piracy.
- josephcsible 4y agoAren't Web browsers often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights? Why don't they get rid of Safari then?
- kube-system 4y agoExtremely rarely. Usually they are used for visiting legal websites.
- chomp 4y agoThe grand majority of HTTP traffic (in the US at least) is legal. Obviously one can break the law with anything that can reach the internet, but it seems Apple is drawing a line in the sand for what they believe to be a category of apps that in reality, are used more often than not for piracy. By the way, don't take my comments as endorsing Apple's position. I personally think torrents on iOS is silly due to the battery and connectivity issues, but I feel like people should at least be able to sideload apps if Apple doesn't want to host them.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y agoGreater than 99% of web browser traffic is legal. Greater than 99% of torrent traffic is illegal. If you can't see the difference and why this matters, I don't know what to tell you.
- Apreche 4y agoThere's the piracy reason, obviously. But for iOS specifically there is an additional reason. A torrent client that is downloading and uploading so much will absolutely shred the battery life on any kind of mobile device. If someone has a metered data plan, it will completely wreck that as well.
- BudaDude 4y agoI think its mostly because of piracy. While the battery life argument is valid, iOS is ruthless when it comes to killing apps in the background that are using a lot of battery.
- topdownjimmy 4y agoSame. Frustrating that I can't watch Big Buck Bunny or share Ubuntu with my friends using iPhone.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pwinnski 4y agoYour overuse of the word "technically" puts me in mind of a defendant in a courtroom saying, "Technically, your honor, I was swinging the bat to loosen up my shoulder muscles. He could technically have gotten out of the way, if not after the first hit, certainly after the second or third." Technically the stated purpose for X can be whatever, the actual purpose is what matters. People have the idea that all law and ethics relies heavily on the wording of edge cases, but it's just not so. The vast majority of both law and ethics is based on plain and simple understanding. The plain and simple understanding of a general-purpose torrent client is that it is for piracy. Is there a 0.0000001% use-case for Linux ISOs (on your phone!) or what have you? Sure, but those are the edge cases, and are easily satisfied using Safari on iOS. You could technically light a fire and use a blanket to send smoke signals that use morse code for hexadecimal numbers that represent a uu-encoded representation of an .MKV file for the latest blockbuster too, but that's as unlikely as anyone emailing a gigabyte of pirated content to a large group of people, so it's not really worth considering, is it?
- ngetchell 4y agoToo hard to take a 30% cut?
- DavideNL 4y agoThe problem isn't that Apple does not allow torrent clients. The problem is that Apple dictates what software people are allowed to run on the hardware they own. The EU will end this with DMA: "new rules specifically targeted to address companies like Apple that have "a dual role" with control over both hardware and software look to allow any developer to gain access to any existing hardware feature, such as "near-field communication technology, secure elements and processors, authentication mechanisms, and the software used to control those technologies." https://www.macrumors.com/2022/05/20/eu-plans-to-force-apple-to-give-developers-access/ https://www.macrumors.com/2022/05/20/eu-plans-to-force-apple...