According to a reddit.com thread posted by pepijn809 from the “Official Popcorn Time” team:
“Time4Popcorn uses a centralized server system which can make it vulnerable to takedowns,backdoors and other malwarious code. At this point in time however there has not been found any harmful code in Time4Popcorn.”
The background for the claim
If you’re visiting iWillFolo on a regular basis, then there’s probably no need to introduce you to Popcorn-Time app and its capabilities, if you aren’t then you might want to read this post first.
As you already may or may not know, after the original Popcorn-Time project founders have concluded they’d reached their destination goal, they announced their retirement and the shutting down of the project.
This act, in turn, has ignited other groups of developers which weren’t yet ready to give up on such a wonderful creation, to step in.
Since there wasn’t any orderly transfer of power, things started to get a bit chaotic, to put in a subtle way.
The chain of events
The first known direct descendant of the original PT project was maintained by mainly 2 devs known as isra17 and jduncanator.
Later on, jduncanator has mysteriously disappeared along with the project site being taken down. At this point, isra17 has decided to take things to his own hands and to reestablish the website, this time under the domain get-popcorn.com.
However, until the new site has been firmly established, another group of devs had already came up with their own website under the domain time4popcorn.eu, which hasn’t seen any take downs whatsoever.
The core dispute
When reading carefully what pepijn809 and Corto from the Official Popcorn Time team have to say on the matter, one thing becomes quite clear.
The main complaint of Official Popcorn Time devs is; The code was stolen from them without giving credits to its rightful owners.
For instance, here’s what Corto had to say on the reddit thread, which addresses the issue:
“I’m Corto from the Popcorn Time team… Time4Popcorn are stealing the code, repeatedly. When they put out a new version on their website, it’s usually a development version ripped from the community project we’re involved in…”
And here’s what pepijn809 said:
“our Popcorn Time Community however still wants to see credits for the rip-off, since they did use the code.”
According to the same reddit thread, Time4Popcorn had an extensive response to the accusations, which in order to not overload this post, I’ll bring only in essence. If you want to read the full thread, visit the link above.
“In the past 2 weeks we have witnessed a huge unprecedented attack… A group of only 20 developers who love using the word “official” made us into their worst nemesis and frankly- we don’t know why.
As for the nonsense of “stealing” code from others and not giving credit:
In the upcoming weeks… time4popcorn will work for the first time on Windows XP. We will have Chromecast support, release an Android version, a smart TV version and everything else we wrote above.
In order to achieve all of this we had to develop the whole app over from scratch.”
How official are the “Official Popcorn-Time” really are?
Well, the straightforward answer is – it’s hard to say, since most of the work on the project is done under aliases and nicknames, and furthermore, all of the current developer teams are basically descendants of the original project.
However, to put things in their perspective, Time4Popcorn team has actually said in one of their accusation responses that they are all “Popcorn Time users just like yourselves”, i.e. they are not related to the original project.
So these are known facts, from here on it’s up to you to decide what to make of it.
On the next post, in order not to overburden an already lengthy post, I shall write about the practical difference between PT and T4P and how to install (build) PT from Github.
