TorrentFreak

Earlier this week the Evad3rs dev team pleased the Apple world by releasing their most complex jailbreak yet. Their amazing and super-simple tool allows anyone to run unsigned code on their iOS6 firmware in a matter of minutes, smashing Apple’s control over what can and cannot be installed on their devices. BitTorrent apps are completely outlawed by the Cupertino outfit, but a new version of a torrent client released this week bypasses those restrictions.

Hackulous, perhaps the Internet’s most famous cracked app community, has dramatically closed its doors. The community shut down yesterday but that isn’t the only damage. Apptrackr, the web-based partner index for cracked apps and Installous, the app used by millions to transfer cracked apps to their iDevices, have also been disabled. The operators cite lack of activity for the shutdown but it seems unlikely that’s the only reason.

For a minute we got excited. Apple approved two BitTorrent Apps in recent weeks, suggesting that the company had lifted its ban on file-sharing applications. But today came the inevitable disappointment. Apple just informed one of the developers that it made a mistake during the approval process, and the company is about to pull his BitTorrent app from the App Store.

Installous, currently resident on millions of jailbroken iPhones and other iDevices, has undergone an interesting upgrade. This piece of software, which is designed to allow the installation of cracked apps, has until now relied on users pulling those apps from cyberlockers. Now, thanks to some nifty coding, Installous can now pull packages from torrent swarms by utilizing magnet links.

For many Mac users Transmission is the BitTorrent client of choice. Unfortunately, managing Transmission’s BitTorrent downloads on the iPhone or iPad can only be done through a web-interface. This annoyance is now resolved thanks to iControlbits, the first and only native iPhone app for the Transmission client that apparently escaped the prying eye of Apple’s anti-torrent police.

Apple is known for the stringent guidelines it applies when deciding which software to allow into their App Store – BitTorrent is one of the things on their ban list. However, one developer who carefully avoided the dirty word “torrent” in the submission process, eventually managed to get a BitTorrent-related App approved by Apple.

On the eve of the iPhone 4 jailbreak by the iPhone Dev Team, and with the recent positive rulings over jailbreaking’s legality, concerns over the purpose and impact of opening Apple’s line of iOS devices still exist. Dissident from Hackulous explains why he believes piracy does not ruin the image of jailbreaking, and gives insight into the real effects piracy has on application developers.