

Apple Pulls BitTorrent iPhone App from Store - razin
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/apple_pulls_bittorrent_iphone_app_from_store.php

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mitchellh
It may be that the fact this is a BitTorrent app has little or nothing to do
with it being pulled...

The article mentioned that to even use the app it requires a premium
ImageShack membership. I'm not an iPhone developer, but from what I've read
online, this itself is a violation of the terms, and may be the reason for
pulling the app. While I don't have the exact rule on hand, it is something
along the lines that your app can't require a paid membership to use, unless
you're able to offer a trial/signup in the app.

I'm more inclined to believe this especially because it sounds like this isn't
a BitTorrent downloader, but just a manager, which I don't really see as an
issue.

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DrJokepu
The Spotify app requires a premium membership and Apple has no problems with
that. The British Airways app requires a British Airways Executive Club
membership and Apple has no problem with that. Requiring (free or paid)
membership is only a problem in the App Store if it's unreasonable, e.g. the
core functionality of the app would work without a membership.

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eps
Can anyone elaborate on what developer guidelines would an app implementing a
form of BitTorrent client violate?

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grkhetan
Well, from the guidelines - it violates this guideline:

22.4 Apps that enable illegal file sharing will be rejected

Also in general, bittorrent is maily used to download copyrighted content
illegally. I mean comeon, all bittorrent users know it and use it for that.

Secondly, I really dont think iphone is good for bittorrent also -- i mean you
would continuously loose battery and bandwidth. Also its background multi-
tasking does not allow more than 10 minutes of downloading so it will not work
properly in the first place. Thats why, this app was merely monitoring and
managing download queues happening on a server. So its better in terms of
implementation but still voilates copyright guidelines and illegal files
sharing guidelines.

~~~
scrrr
_Also in general, bittorrent is maily used to download copyrighted content
illegally. I mean comeon, all bittorrent users know it and use it for that._

It's a pity though. BitTorrent is advanced technology that should be used more
widely and beyond file-sharing, for example by music and video artists and
software vendors.

~~~
cookiecaper
There are significant deployments of BT among software vendors. You probably
already know about them, but in case you don't, off the top of my head,
Blizzard uses BitTorrent to distribute patches for WoW and most Linux
distributions use torrents to distribute ISOs. Both perfectly legal,
legitimate, and great uses of BitTorrent.

I wish that BitTorrent usage was more prolific among legit large downloads
too, it would really help with corruption, etc. BitTorrent is really the
simplest way to fix a large file that mostly downloaded correctly but has a
few corrupt chunks; the torrent client resolves that problem automatically for
already-downloaded files and fixes it on-the-fly on downloads it handles.

It is really annoying to download a 350MB service pack from Microsoft at
300kb/s and then have to download the whole thing again because "the file was
corrupt". I don't know if MS just has shoddy servers or what but I've had that
happen multiple times. Large torrent swarms, which Microsoft could easily
populate itself but may not even need to, usually max out a client's
connection and then the corruption thing would never happen.

I should try to sell consulting services on torrents to MS at some point I
guess.

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jonursenbach
Well that didn't take long at all.

