Even though Popcorn Time has been facing a lot of difficulties due to the borderline illegal nature of the application, it’s still going strong and its developers are actively releasing updates for it. Just recently, the app’s versions for Windows, Mac and Android received updates adding new features and polishing the current ones with bug fixes, and there are also rumors that the app is about to be brought back to the iTunes App Store in a legitimate standalone version sometime soon as well.
The team developing the app right now is actually the original development team that made the app earlier, and they have taken over the development of their project once again. According to their statement about the latest update, it’s mostly a patch aimed at UI fixes, as well as improving the application’s stability, as the team has spent a lot of time and effort refining the functionality of the application and ensuring that it doesn’t crash or cause any unexpected issues.
Additionally, they have been putting more effort into the app’s actual content, and they have improved what’s on offer by making sure that viewers won’t be presented with any non-playing or broken movies, or shows missing some of their episodes. There have also been reports of users getting stuck in the middle of an episode of a TV show, another problem that has reportedly been addressed in the latest version.
When is the rumored standalone version of the application coming then? That’s hard to tell at this point, as Apple seemed to be very strongly against the app when they removed it from their app store. Still, it wasn’t so much that Apple were opposing the app’s nature, rather the fact that they were receiving lots of complaints about the application and were eventually forced to remove it.
So if the developers of Popcorn Time manage to revive their app in a way that circumvents those complaints, it’s likely that Apple could leave it be, as long as nobody is able to send them any legitimate takedown notices. The app was particularly popular on Apple’s platform, and the company can definitely gain some points in the eyes of their users if they approved of a revised version of Popcorn Time, so it’s not unlikely that we may see it coming back, one way or another.
All that’s left for interested users at this point is to keep an eye on the app’s changelog to find out when the standalone version for iOS is coming up. It’s likely that the developers will give an advance notification so users can prepare accordingly, and they may even release a beta to test that everything works properly in advance.