This week, Apple for the first time approved a BitTorrent based application with the name of “IS Drive”. The price tag of the App is kept to be $4.99 and it basically allows the users to check and manage downloads in their ImageShack drive Account. Moreover, if thumbnails of the videos are made available by ImageShack, users can also view these thumbnails within the interface of the App.IS Drive basically allows the users who are subscribed with ImageShack torrent download services to add torrents for downloading or control them through a very catchy and visually rich interface. The app’s approval by Apple has been taken as a very out of the way move by the company because Apple normally doesn’t allow BitTorrent as the company believes that BitTorrents are often used to infringe the copyrights.
According to tech Bloggers on the web, this inclusion of a BitTorrent based App is a result of relaxation in Apple’s App Store Review Guideline. This leniency has resulted in the approval of various kinds of Apps and multiple apps which previously were banned by Apple. Apple has been banning these kinds of Apps because the developers at the company were of the view that this infringes the Third party Application rights.
Mostly, BitTorrent Apps were the ones that were dumped because of strict policy in the Apple App Store Review Guidelines. It seems that Apple has eased off a bit in this particular area.
Derek Kepner, developer of the IS Drive said in a blog post that although Apple has approved the App, but I think that I am on a danger ground here and a considerable improvements are required to make this App a consolidated part of the App Store. The developer is planning to add a search feature that will enable the users to manually add the torrent site which ever they feel like is more suitable.
According to developer’s blog post, Derek loved ImageShack’s torrent drive service and he wanted to code an app to make it more usable on multitude of platforms.
