[BLOG] Time For Popcorn Hits Android - But Risks Remain

[CrimsonShade]

This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »


When Popcorn Time first hit Windows PCs, Hollywood was a picture of fear and anger. Here was a service designed to find torrents of all kinds of movies past and present; and make pirated copies of movies available for FREE - and worse, they were open-sourcing the project! Hollywood eventually took down the original code and jailed the person responsible - but not before other people grabbed the code and forked it, creating similar software and projects of their own. And now, Popcorn Time is going mobile.



That's because on the project's most popular forks, Time4Popcorn, have released an Android app online. Sporting the same look, feel and selection of films as the desktop version, Time4Popcorn's app is only recommended for those with generous data plans; as it also streams the films from torrents rather than offering them directly. Some elements of the Android interface are still quite low-res compared to the Desktop version and there are UI elements that don't work yet, plus some films have a noticeable delay before they start playing due to the availability or speed of the torrent process.



Naturally, with movie piracy being a criminal offence, Google were not at all pleased to see the Android app released. While Time4Popcorn apparently submitted the app to the official Google Play store, don't expect to find it there yourself, as Google removed it on the grounds of "theft of intellectual property". As a result, it can only be downloaded from Time4Popcorn's website.



If this hasn't put you off using the new App, however, there might be an even BIGGER reason to urge consumers to avoid it. The Time4Popcorn app's functionality is mainly served by a centralised server, which makes it vulnerable both to takedown attempts by legal bodies or angry hackers; as well as opening the potential for malware to be distributed through it. Indeed, some users allege that the app contains malware already - although this does not seem to be the case, as the developers of the app makes its source code public and no dangerous code has been found within. Whatever the case may be, the point is that by utilising this single central server approach - which is also used by the Desktop version - Time4Popcorn offers no safety net and no guarantees as to the availability, safety and security of the service, should anything happen to that server in the future. You use it at your own risk.



Just like on Windows, however, the open-source nature of Popcorn Time means it may only be a matter of time before a second Android version is released; and there's even been interest in building it for Chromecast. Perhaps this is the sad fact of piracy - it continues to evolve and grow even as it gives the finger to the very organisations by which it harms, yet whom without which it would cease to exist.