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.
> YouTube
Hmmm.
Piracy on YouTube isn't 0%, obviously. But it isn't in the same league, or comparable to torrenting.
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.
Slap a torrent together of the same payload and it'd be guaranteed not to stall/error because of the network.
while; wget -c http://...; end
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This type of torrent transfer goes for a lot of updating processing as companies can't handle the bandwidth.
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
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.