Comment by CharlesW
8 months ago
It’s surprising that anyone would think EU politicians might punish Apple for deplatforming a single BitTorrent app. Surely those politicians aren’t dense enough to believe users are relying on their phones to distribute Linux ISOs.
iTorrent's ability to play while "sharing" was the bridge too far. There are plenty of players for personal media in the App Store (Plex, Jellyfin, etc.), but as a BitTorrent client it's clear that its primary purpose was to play media that was vanishingly unlikely to be the user's.
It also didn’t help that AltStore PAL regularly spotlighted these apps, basically taunting corpos and eurocrats alike. On the bright side, qBitControl won’t be affected, since it isn’t a BitTorrent client itself but merely a remote for qBittorrent.
The fact that they retain the technical capability to deplatform apps outside their app store is a violation of the DMA.
It would be surprising if the EU they didn't hit Apple with billions in fines for the most obvious form of malicious non-compliance after going through all that effort of passing the regulations.
> The fact that they retain the technical capability to deplatform apps outside their app store is a violation of the DMA.
Not in general, and courts would have to decide whether it's a violation in this specific case. The DMA doesn't force Apple to platform apps used primarily for piracy, it just requires that they be able to justify restrictions and keep them as narrow as possible. De-platforming a specific app is about as narrow as it gets.
Also, it's arguable that the DSA (Digital Services Act), which is just as applicable, actually compels Apple to de-platform this app. The DMA is a competition law, and allowing an app whose primary purpose is distribution of infringing content undermines fair competition among legitimate content providers.
> it just requires that they be able to justify restrictions and keep them as narrow as possible
But they haven't provided a justification for this. The least you'd expect would be a "this app violates notarization guideline x.x.x". They might have to edit the CSS on their website a little (add the .lighter-override class) but after that they could just cite 5.2.3 [1].
[1] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#leg...
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Yes in general. The whole entire premise of the DMA is that gatekeepers should have their power to meddle with competitors taken away.
Article 6(4).
> The gatekeeper shall allow and technically enable the installation and effective use of third-party software applications or software application stores using, or interoperating with, its operating system and allow those software applications or software application stores to be accessed by means other than the relevant core platform services of that gatekeeper.
By requiring notarization, Apple requires users and developers to use their core platform services in order to access 3rd party apps.
i use it to share pictures from my NAS to my phone. And play video from it. Also, in Belgium, it's completely legal to rip and share ( within family circle ) copyrighted content.
This is an unusual (and risky) choice for most people, since BitTorrent is designed for swarm distribution, and ISPs generally don't look kindly on subscribers seeding torrents on their networks. I think it's safe to say that 99.99% of people use options like DLNA/UPnP, Plex, Jellyfin, or simple SMB/NFS shares for personal media sharing.