Most game file transfers are torrent based, so if you've ever played an MMO you've been involved in a torrent. Definitely not piracy.

This type of torrent transfer goes for a lot of updating processing as companies can't handle the bandwidth.

Does the App Store prohibit the use of a custom torrent client for downloading game data? This is a legitimate use-case for torrenting, but also one that does not warrant general-purpose torrent clients in the App Store.

I've seen indirect evidence of custom torrent clients in games in the App Store.

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.

I'm just going off of the statement %99.99999whatever of torrent use is for illegal purposes, which is a BS statistic.

We were monitoring 18.5 million torrents, over 292 million IP addresses, it took a Cassandra cluster of 18 nodes just to store this information. It was writing 18,000 writes a second, 24/7.

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

that is because you keep promoting it as such. In reality there is no piracy without a day in court.

In reality, Apple isn't a criminal prosecutor.

By that reasoning shouldn't encryption also be banned?

No, the vast majority of encryption is not used for illegal activity.

Only because the technology was pushed forward and adopted for the masses.

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.

Oh sure, I use torrent for legitimate things as well, e.g. Internet Archive downloads and Linux ISO image downloads, and don't think that Apple should ban the apps. I'm just pointing out that the analogy doesn't work.

Funny that you mention normal activities that are all allowed on Apple as examples of good P2P uses. Most of the sending large amounts of data P2P uses are illegal file sharing.

I don't think Apple cares about sending data in general. Apple allows other P2P file sharing apps on the app store (Resilio Sync or Möbius Sync come to mind).

The phrase used was "The vast majority"

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.

And everything on Netflix is also available, unencrypted, on torrent.

We are very very sure. HTTPS adoption across the web is at 95%. Onion and VPN traffic are rounding errors compared to the amount of traffic on the web.

Maybe you forgot that the communication to https://news.ycombinator.com is encrypted.

Less than 99.9999% of encryption is for piracy, so no, the reasoning isn’t transitive from torrenting to encryption.

But near 100% of piracy uses encryption