uTorrent iPhone App Rejected by Apple, Goes Underground
Written by Ernesto on August 31, 2009Apple is known for the stringent guidelines it applies when deciding which software it allows in their App Store – BitTorrent is one of the things on their ban list. Apple argues that BitTorrent is often used to infringe copyrights and that such applications are a no go for the App Store, forcing developers to go underground.
µMonitor is a handy iPhone application that allows users to control their uTorrent client on the go. After putting months of hard work into getting the software ready for a public release, the developer Claudio was told by Apple that everything related to BitTorrent has been banned from their App Store.
“We’ve reviewed µMonitor and determined that we cannot post this version of your application to the App Store at this time because this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights. We have chosen to not publish this type of application to the App Store,” Apple wrote to the developer after a 4 month review process.
This is not the first time that Apple has excluded a BitTorrent-related product from its store. In May they also banned an application designed to remotely-control the Transmission BitTorrent client for the same reasons outlined above.
Interestingly Apple has no problem allowing Usenet related applications in their store. myNZB for example is an application that is available from the App Store although it’s similar in functionality to the BitTorrent apps that were rejected.
Despite Apple’s blockade, there is still a way to get µMonitor on your iPhone. Instead of throwing months of hard work overboard, µMonitor’s developer has recently decided to bypass the Apps Store and make the application available to ‘jailbroken’ iPhone users from the Cydia repository.
Thanks to Apple, uTorrent users who want to control their torrent via an iPhone application have no other option than to jailbreak their phone. Detailed instructions on how to get µMonitor working on your phone can be found on Claudio’s website.
The Evil µMonitor App
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85 Responses
And yet they make a Youtube app where you can watch copyright infringing videos whenever you want.
hypocrites!
Apple hates when people jailbreak but they are making people do it because people want apps like this
Smartass move, Apple.
Now you’ll find 70% of Iphone are jailbroken, congrats
this wont work no system is uncrackable. dont buy from companies who try to dictate what you can and cannot do with what is rightfully yours.
How can I now download my Creative Commons music with an iPhone?
i am really get sick of apple and their lame moves
Use the WebUI. Download the version that’s optimized for iPhones. Continue to bitch.
That’s why I will never buy anything from apple. Totally sucks. More than M$.
I was never going to jailbreak my iTouch…I guess I’ll do it now and get lots of free apps.
Thanks Apple!
Apple sucks. Why do people buy Apple products , really. overpriced and restrictive.
Plenty of better alternatives around.
laughs at Apple for the huge mistake their making…roflmao
Playing devil’s advocate, Apple *did* announce at its OS 3.0 event in March that file-sharing/P2P apps would be flat-out denied, just like porn apps and a couple of other categories.
I’m not saying it’s ok, I’m just saying this is absolutely not surprising in any way.
If you have Android there is a great app that does not require any hackery to access your uTorrent or other torrent apps, even has search function so you can find and add all from the app. “Transdroid” is the name.
“this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights”
Yeah, e-mail is often used for infringement.
Web browsers are often used for infringement.
120 GB iPods themselves are an entire device category often used for infringement. It would cost about $30,000 to fill them with purchased music.
Baby, bathwater, gone…
I have the HTC Hero which runs Google Android OS software.
And I have the Transdroid and, and it’s very convenient.
I believe, like others who have posted, it is a bad move for Apple as more will jailbreak their devices.
Yup, Apple makes an entire line of devices that are commonly used to infringe. Its their main business model. I bet more than 99% of iPods are used to infringe copyright. Computers are commonly used to infringe copyright too. In other words, Apple’s entire product line.
Give me a break Apple, cry me a fuck’in river. As if you have a right to claim when things are used to infringe copyright or not.
Apple = Steve Jobs = crap
“..Apple argues that BitTorrent is often used to infringe copyrights..”
By their logic, we should also ban their computers because people can use them to also infringe. What do you say, who’s with me in imposing a ban on apple? Im sure they won’t mind, they’re all about protecting rights, hm?
We should also ban knives because they’re used to kill people, right?
@1 So True! It’s so messed up!
care
wtf is an iTouch? sounds like something to land you in jail.
Apple have profited majorly off the back of filesharing (120GB iPod anyone?) and yet they won’t allow BitTorrent to be used on their devices.
Why?
iTunes store…
hehehe I bought an iPod just to carry my torrent downloaded music (thanks TPB!) with me.
Apple makes great hardware, great build quality, looks very good. But this AppStore is s**t. Just that.
To anyone that wish buy and iPhone or iPod Touch: Buy you will not regret, but before doing anything, jailbreak it.
what is the address to the repo the developer used?
The reason they are not allowing this app has nothing to do with copyright. It is purely because they could lose profits through their own ichoons store.
“everything related to BitTorrent has been banned from their App Store.”
I fail to see how this is infringing your rights? It’s like wal-mart not selling bootlegs. (And yes, I do know that this application is just a remote)
This is what puts me off the iPhone, for what is a majorly expensive peice of kit, your forced to break the warrenty to use it as YOU the consumer wants…
I find it funny that Apple encourages people to jailbreak the phone for, once you’ve done it you might as well not bother buying another app again.
i found the cydia repo its http://repo.theiphonebay.org
Apple has turned into rotten cider.
I’m a PC and I bittorrent :)
lack of money…
Blackberry + Opera Mini + uTorrent WebUI = apple juice
“uTorrent iPhone App Rejected by Apple”
It happilly hapen that I don’t need an iPhone.
WTF are bootlegs?
@14
shhh dont tell anyone
Hope apple is happy, they just motivated me to jailbreak my touch.
Thanks apple, I hadn’t realized what I was missing before. I agree with #23 ‘iPod’:
“To anyone that wish buy and iPhone or iPod Touch: Buy you will not regret, but before doing anything, jailbreak it.”
wow im so proud of apple making a lame ass move on their part, its like i never understood why the ipod touch was more expensive than the iphone since the iphone can can more than the touch, but anyways if your gonna get an iphone then u might as well jailbreak it bcuz of certain apps, n the only productsa i like from apple is the iTouch n the newest ipod n itunes, everythin else is such a waste of $
Because of all this fuzz, the word “torrents” is like a buzz word for those companies. Until torrents are legalized, we will be getting crap like that all the time.
“Thanks to Apple, uTorrent users who want to control their torrent via an iPhone application have no other option than to jailbreak their phone.”
They do have another option: WebUI.
apple are notorious for their double-standards on copyright. simply put they’ll lose money if they allow torrent aps on phones so of course they’re not gona allow them. allowing usenet is very hypocritical tho…
Bootleg = Pirated
Does Walnut sells pirated stuffs?
@21 – iTouch
iTouch is something like jailbait…
Meh, it’s just the iPod Touch (and there is a Nintendo DS flashcard which bears that name as well, but that’s not what the other replyer ment).
Apple have a long history of heavy handed tactics.
The funny part is they had a real pirate flag on their HQ in the beginning and call themselves the pirates from the silicon valley LoL
I will always have a special connection to apple after it was an apple ][ that taught me how to program I miss those days.
Saying that I don’t buy apple things anymore, and the reason is I don’t want to have to deal with a tight closed system with interoperability problems across the board although their products are an inspiration to cutting edge design.
maybe they should ban the web-browsers to for helping us finding the “illegal” material
Cellphones are used to create remote detonation bombs used by everyone from insurgens in Iraq to Al-Quada and Taliban in Afghanistan.
Ban all cellphones from Apple’s repertoire too then, its much more dangerous then P2P.
Oh yeah, that would hurt their bottom line in a major way, …
Only reason Apple refuses certain apps is to cover their asses legally.
User and developer rights is something they don’t give a crap about, covering their own ass and money is the only thing they do care about.
I think apple is a good company who make good software, Hell, I am typing this on my macbook pro while playing a game on my Mac Pro. But I would never get an iPod Touch etc because of the app store
Can I ask the forum a question. If you were to see the term underground app would you immediately see it as one that bypasses the app store.
We are using the term underground app of the week in our social network http://www.iwikphone.com but want to express the idea of an app as a cool up and coming one. any suggestions to a new title?
Mac is for noobs…simple as that.
A well built and maintained PC can do everything a Mac can, and much more. It is also faster and less expensive(not grossly overpriced).
I will admit for a non computer savvy user, the mac is great, and the overall design is pretty nice, but for anyone with a clue its a bad purchase. Buying Apple products is also giving the thumbs up for companies to put massive restrictions on stuff you pay good money for.
Not buying Apple is the right choice, for multiple reasons.
@48
I think you are thinking of the iphone, on my mac, I can pretty much do anything I want, no restrictions on there, might be overpriced but hey, it’s for the style :)
the iphone sucks big time (whoah, it now can do cut&paste whoah! how impressive!!!), apple (tm of the beatles…) is a bunch of terrorists who like m$ started by “stealing” other people’s ideas/”intellectual properties” to sell over-expensive shits
@49
No I was actually speaking of the Mac, a bit off-topic yes…
So you can walk down to your computer store, buy a new gfx card and install it?
You can play all new games on it?
I think not, there are restrictions, and lots of them, you are just too blinded by the shiny Apple logo to realize it :P
i’m sorry for going a bit off-topic guys, just had to throw it out there :)
I’m gonna make a jailbreak,
And I’m lookin’
towards the sky!
I’m gonna make a jailbreak,
Ah, how I wish that
I could fly!
All in the name of Liberty!
All in the name of Liberty!
Got to be free!
Why not just use the WebUI?
Is there an S60 app like this?
Just wondering… my Nokia is S40 and was thinking of upgrading to a newer model… with S60v3… just for the app support.
@51
1: No, gfx card upgrades are limited by apple which is a PITA!
2: is no problem with a winXP on a bootcamp partition(dual boot).
3: restriction are like rules, which beg to be broken…. and Windows users usually know better how to download an crack a software they want but can’t afford.
speaking for myself: i like macs because of the neat design.
Modding any PC to look, sound and feel the same like a Mac Pro costs more than buying mac hardware in the first place.
people who buy apple are retards. end of story
Guess Apple has not heard about Linux yet.
It’s widely distributed via bittorrent.
Here is the process I used to open my new iphone.
1 – Remove plastic wrapping.
2 – Open box.
3 – Charge.
4 – jailbreak phone.
5 – Fill phone up with illegal music and unauthorized apps.
@Holo, I’m not surprised that your priority in life is to play video games. It’s such a terrible limiting factor. The upgrade paths for video cards is limiting but I’ve never been a PC gamer so that point is irrelevant to me.
I used to build my own PCs and upgrade and tweak them endlessly. Guess what? It gets old. But also consider a cycle of where I buy a Mac and a Wintel every 5 years. My MacPro is STILL as fast as when I bought it in 2006. However, I still have to upgrade my windows box to deal with the resource requirements of Vista/7. Not to mention the maintenance and headaches of having to figure out why my wintel is slow or if I have a virus or whatever the hell is wrong with it.
The upfront costs appear to be higher but when a product cycle begins, they are competitively priced. Benchmarks show that Macs even run windows faster than a comparably configured windows machine from Dell/HP. And in the long run the costs are less.
Especially the mental costs. Now, when I get home, I fire up Pro Tools, XCode or iMovie and get to doing what I want to do rather than tweak or troubleshoot. What put me over the edge was my machine rebooting in the middle of a recording session. I got my MacPro and it’s been mostly smooth since.
That’s not to say that Macs aren’t trouble free but they ARE much less frustrating. I’m also a software developer by trade and I know computers. I’ve developed for windows and mac. There is no contest. My XP machine at work has a hard time handling all the windows I have open.
Regarding the Appstore: It has it’s limitations and problems. But keep in mind that it is extremely new and as Apple ALWAYS does, they come up with good solutions. They didn’t anticipate the success and they are working through the problems. But it is destroying the competition right now. $200M in revenue vs $5M for android per month. They have to be doing something right. So stop whining that you can control your illegal downloading from your phone.
>Playing devil’s advocate, Apple *did* announce at its OS 3.0 event in March that file-sharing/P2P apps would be flat-out denied, just like porn apps and a couple of other categories.
That’s not the issue. The issue is that their reason for doing so is utter nonsense.
For that matter, they have no reason to reject porn apps either. The whole issue of offending people who don’t want to see it can be gotten around by MAKING IT AN OPT-IN FEATURE. That way the only people who are “exposed” to it are those who expressly choose to be.
Yawn, good thing there is the Cydia App store :)
RT
http://anoweb.limewebs.com
oh QQ
Cowon’s make better MP3 players than Crapple.
Well I could say that iPods are often used to store and play music that is ‘illegally’ downloaded.
I could also say Safari (which is on the iPod) could be used to control uTorrent via its WebUI, which can be used to download ‘illegal’ files.
I think this is a stupid argument. Is anyone truly surprised that apple blocked this software. If you are then jump off a bridge and be surprised that the government didn’t stop you via local authorities. You guys are starting to sound like a bunch of cry babies. Jailbreak your phone and gently remove the tampon from your vag and all will be well. You act like apple is pressing a cease and desist order against cydia or Dev-Team.
This is one of the reasons why I wouldn’t go Iphone. Go Android or Windows Mobile so you don’t have to worry about this kind of crap.
It’s a good thing Apple approved apps like “iFart” and “Atomic Fart” yet saw fit to deny this one. Classy, Apple. Real classy.
Took an excerpt and posted it on http://www.geekmontage.com with a linkback. Apple needs to realize that not everything Torrent-related is evil. This app can be very useful to a lot of people. It’s unfortunate about the underground development, but hopefully it’ll get the amount of downloads it deserves.
>uTorrent users who want to control their torrent via an iPhone application have no other option than to jailbreak their phone
Or they can use the web interface…
Too bad the TRANSMISSION Devs won’t add their iPhone App to Cydia.
Strange this this app store everything hugely expensive and NO PORN apps but you can buy Iceqeens “whore app”?
I just don’t understand ipple
As others have said, the webui has been the way to go for months anyway.
However, I can wait to see the FCC smack apple around for their stupid app store policies.
shit yeah, i was looking for somthing just like this literally 2 days ago
@21 lol
“man convicted of using itouch near little children”
“apple sues said man for copyright abuse”
:P
Steve Jobs is the worst sort of hypocrite. He started out phreaking with Steve Wozniak (who he didn’t treat so well), and now he spends his days dictating what people can do with products that they legally own. What is worse, Jobs really doesn’t know all that much about system design or programming. Some would say that he got ahead in life BECAUSE of Wozniak.
Apple is indeed an evil organization.
They’re at war with Google who they see as a very real threat too.
They removed Google Voice from their app store and other apps relating to it and people have had to resign if they’re affiliated with both companies at the behest of Apple.
@48 I consider myself to be computer savvy but I like OS X’s interface. -Sits back and waits for flames-
Hang on. uTorrent has a web interface. I’ve been using it for years on my Windows phone to finagle my torrents when I am out and about. Tunneled through SSH for security. Why can’t Apple people just use their web browsers to control uTorrent?
yeah. why wouldn’t they let a program that controls the downloading of illegal programs and media? makes NO SENSE. you’d think apple would be totally down with piracy. i mean they make most of their money on people using pirated versions of their OS on netbooks, right?
Holy shit Apple, time to delete all copies of OS X. It could be used for piracy!
Not only do they explode/overheat/catch fire in some reports in Europe, they wont allow BitTorrent. *.*
Do check out the brand new Creative Zii Egg on the Plaszma platform:
http://www.zii.com/Developer/Landing.aspx
To compete with the iPod Touch.
Completely open source, non-proprietary.
The features are absolutely insane!$200 starting price!
Obviously, Apple don’t want to be bothered by the court.
But, come on… iPhone downloading Fedora? He can do better than that. lol
Steve Jobs, you are a fucking whore!
Why don’t they just release it in Cydia (The app installer for Jail-broken iPods)?
nice! Just added :D
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently
Take back your phone!
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