When you hear of BitTorrent, we all know the first thing that comes to your mind — Downloads. We also know the first thing that comes to company’s minds — Piracy, and the inevitable loss of profit.
So when news came that a bittorrent app called IS Drive has appeared in the Apple App Store (where you basically buy all those applications for your iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad), it caught us by surprise. We all know that not too long ago, Apple clearly has this principle of refusing the approval bittorrent applications and the like as they clearly promote piracy and other illegal internet activity.
BitTorrent is a file-sharing protocol that allows users to use their dedicated bandwidth to seed file to many, and we mean many, users. Initially, it is mostly connected to illegal activity for sharing licensed content but now, it’s also being used for legit services like those of ImageShack and in the recent months, Mininova (now only posting legal content).
It is quite obvious as to why Apple chooses to block these kinds of applications as it will undermine it’s iTunes business, so what are the possible reasons for this recent act? First, Apple has faced a lot of criticism in terms of their store approval guidelines and security and thus, loosened up their guidelines a little bit.
Another reason is that the IS Drive approval may have been a possible slip-up on Apple’s part as they may not have realized that it’s a BitTorrent client. An IS Drive developer told in a statement with TorrentFreak:
“I always had the thought that if I didn’t call the app a ‘torrent client,’ Apple would probably let it through the review process.”
The IS Drive sells at $4.99 in the Apple App store and the ImageShack service bundle comes with a monthly or daily fee.
