Why doesn’t Apple allow torrent clients on the app store?

Apple doesn't believe in software that exposes their users to content outside of their walled garden.

There's the piracy reason, obviously.

But for iOS specifically there is an additional reason. A torrent client that is downloading and uploading so much will absolutely shred the battery life on any kind of mobile device. If someone has a metered data plan, it will completely wreck that as well.

Your overuse of the word "technically" puts me in mind of a defendant in a courtroom saying, "Technically, your honor, I was swinging the bat to loosen up my shoulder muscles. He could technically have gotten out of the way, if not after the first hit, certainly after the second or third."

Technically the stated purpose for X can be whatever, the actual purpose is what matters. People have the idea that all law and ethics relies heavily on the wording of edge cases, but it's just not so. The vast majority of both law and ethics is based on plain and simple understanding.

The plain and simple understanding of a general-purpose torrent client is that it is for piracy. Is there a 0.0000001% use-case for Linux ISOs (on your phone!) or what have you? Sure, but those are the edge cases, and are easily satisfied using Safari on iOS.

You could technically light a fire and use a blanket to send smoke signals that use morse code for hexadecimal numbers that represent a uu-encoded representation of an .MKV file for the latest blockbuster too, but that's as unlikely as anyone emailing a gigabyte of pirated content to a large group of people, so it's not really worth considering, is it?

From Apple: "... because this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights."

Which isn't incorrect, because the overwhelming majority of Bittorrent traffic is piracy.

The problem isn't that Apple does not allow torrent clients. The problem is that Apple dictates what software people are allowed to run on the hardware they own.

The EU will end this with DMA:

"new rules specifically targeted to address companies like Apple that have "a dual role" with control over both hardware and software look to allow any developer to gain access to any existing hardware feature, such as "near-field communication technology, secure elements and processors, authentication mechanisms, and the software used to control those technologies."

https://www.macrumors.com/2022/05/20/eu-plans-to-force-apple...

I used to work at a BitTorrent monitoring company, “often used for piracy” is a very favourable explanation.

99.9999% of torrent activity is piracy. My guess is that’s the reason.

Same. Frustrating that I can't watch Big Buck Bunny or share Ubuntu with my friends using iPhone.

Too hard to take a 30% cut?