A BitTorrent app called IS Drive is now available for iPhone, despite Apple’s history of rejecting this sort of app.
Even though Apple loosened some of its guidelines for the iOS Developer Program in early September, the policy still reads that your app cannot break the law or infringe on copyrights. And that’s the reason why there have been no BitTorrent apps to date, according to an Apple spokesman who claimed last year when another BitTorrent app was rejected that “this category of application is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights.”
It was a surprise, then, to see the approval of IS Drive, now available in the App Store.
IS Drive allows users of Imageshack‘s torrent download service to check and manage their downloads. The app was previously available on Cydia under the name “Jack Torrents.” The app does require a premium Imageshack membership.
In an interview with TorrentFreak, app developer Derek Kepner admitted, “I’m on dangerous ground here.” Insisting that the app is not designed to break the law, Kepner says, “I always had the thought that if I didn’t call the app a “torrent client”, Apple would probably let it through the review process. After all, there is no real torrenting happening on the client side. It’s not a torrent client. It’s an ImageShack Drive client.”
Whether it’s a question of semantics or a question of luck that got the app past the Apple reviewers, IS Drive is – for the time being – available in the App Store for $4.99.
