'Netflix of Torrents' Popcorn Time App Now Available for Android

Popcorn Time is one of the best BitTorrent clients out there but it has had a bit of a difficult past. The client launched on the PC earlier this year, but legal pressure quickly got it to close down, before it was rescued by the community, and now things appear to be stable. On Wednesday, Popcorn Time has gone mobile, and can be installed on Android, according to reports.

(Also see: To pay or steal: How piracy is offering a better TV and movie viewing experience)

Time4Popcorn'sPopcorn Time app can be downloaded from the developer's website, and it is a full featured app, which letsyou browse, stream and download torrents. Some elements, such as the side tray, have to be added, but the program works already.

The big draw of Popcorn Time is how simple it makes downloading a torrent. Even someone who is not comfortable with finding torrents and then downloading them using a client, and then managing files and actually watching them can handle Popcorn Time, because it presents everything in a simple visual format.

With the newest release by Time4Popcorn including TV shows, all you have to do is click on the TV-Shows tab, then click on - say - Game of Thrones, and you're taken to the latest episode. One click and you're watching the show while it downloads in the background. No searching for torrents, no learning to use a client, and no file management.

According to a report in TechCrunch, the developers said that the app was initially available on Google Play as well, but was pulled by Google, which cited "intellectual property violation".

The development of Popcorn Time continues to be open source, and the source files of the Android app are available on GitHub, in case any programmers want to work on it. This is of course just one of the forks of Popcorn Time that is now available - another version for Chromecast has also been developed, and it's clear that the open source movement means that it will be hard (if not impossible) to stop development on the app moving forward.