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?
Twitter, web browsers, and YouTube are fine on the App Store.
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.
> YouTube
Hmmm.
Mobile Safari ordinarily exposes users to content, media, and applications outside Apple's walled garden, namely, the World Wide Web. Apple's walled garden only restricts the platform to protect users' system security and privacy, only allowing the installation of software from Apple's package manager, the AppStore. Apple does not restrict content, media, or applications.
Contrary to popular belief, dissent is a very good thing. If everyone always agreed, there would never be progress. It is only through dissent that things can improve. Further, I, for one, appreciate cynicism, as it often is efficient in communicating valid criticism. But as far as I am aware, no one cares for inaccuracy and most despise bullshit, libel and slander. Carry on.
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.
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?
Which isn't incorrect, because the overwhelming majority of Bittorrent traffic is piracy.
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.
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.
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...
99.9999% of torrent activity is piracy. My guess is that’s the reason.
This type of torrent transfer goes for a lot of updating processing as companies can't handle the bandwidth.
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