We’ll freely admit it. We have no shame. Here at What Mobile, we love Popcorn Time. Sorry Hollywood, you brought it upon yourselves. And you, dear reader, should love it too. Especially now that there’s more ways to love it than ever, as it has been officially released for Android.
For those unfamiliar with Popcorn Time, it has perhaps best been described as ‘the Netflix of piracy’. You simply download the programme, install, open, and you’re presented with a lovely, clean grid of big-budget Hollywood movies, some of which are even still in the cinema. Simply click on the one you’d like to watch and it begins to stream, as simple as that. It’s a technical marvel as much as anything, not least of all because of how well it works.
Watching a movie on Popcorn Time is essentially like torrenting a flick, except instead of downloading one giant HD movie file before you can watch it Popcorn Time instead streams the torrent. It opens its own media player whilst the file seeds, so that what is presented as ‘buffering’ is instead the movie downloading in chronological order (rather than the usual random packets of data that you would get with a traditional torrent). The app only offers a movie if it has a full HD torrent with ample seeders on hand, meaning that if it lists your desired movie then you can be sure that it will stream without a hitch.
And now it’s on Android. Thanks to the platform’s rather open nature, you can download an app version of the beloved programme straight from the developers’ website. If you don’t mind being a freeloading, low-life criminal scumbag that is.
Here’s a video they made about it. It’s probably the most adorable take on piracy you’ll see, although we’re not sure it’ll hold up in court.
