uTorrent Remains the Most Popular Torrent Client
Journalists from Torrent Freak conducted an in-depth analysis, studying statistics to determine the most popular torrent clients today. The publication notes that over the past decade, the file-sharing landscape has changed significantly, and this also applies to the entire BitTorrent ecosystem. Once-popular trackers like KickassTorrents, Torrentz.eu, and ExtraTorrent no longer exist, and release groups such as YTS and EZTV have also disappeared. However, while websites come and go, the core remains the same: a large audience still prefers one particular torrent client.
More than ten years ago, the publication conducted a similar study, and at that time, uTorrent was the clear leader in popularity among users. As it turns out, not much has changed in 2020.
Using the resource iknowwhatyoudownload, journalists analyzed over 25,000,000 registered BitTorrent connections in a single day last week. It turned out that more than two-thirds (68.6%) of them used the desktop version of uTorrent. The vast majority of people use the latest version of uTorrent (3.5.5), but dozens of older versions were also detected.
Although it is no longer officially supported, thousands of people still use uTorrent for Mac. However, the most popular client for Mac is Transmission. This is one of the most notable changes compared to the previous study. While Transmission also has a beta version for Windows, its user base there is relatively small.
Market Share of Torrent Clients
The table below (not included here) lists all programs with a market share of at least 0.1%, which corresponds to about 25,000 registered connections. Journalists note that BitTorrent clients are identified through a client ID, which is publicly broadcast to trackers and through DHT. The final values are based on a sample of client IDs with at least 10,000 connections.
As you can see, uTorrent, developed by BitTorrent Inc., leads by a wide margin, with the BitTorrent client itself coming in second with only 6.6%. Still, this is good news for BitTorrent Inc., which owns both programs.
In addition to uTorrent’s clear dominance, researchers highlight the position of Libtorrent in the rankings. Libtorrent is not a torrent client, but a library used in various torrent applications.
The most widely used version of Libtorrent is 1.2.2.0. Interestingly, further analysis showed that this library is also used in the latest version of uTorrent Web. This means that instead of its own identifier, the latest web version of uTorrent identifies itself as Libtorrent. As a result, uTorrent’s market share is actually even higher than the reported 68.6%.
Other Notable Clients
Researchers were also surprised to see Zona and MediaGet on the list. Both applications offer downloading and streaming features with a simple interface, and their main user base is in Russia.
Several other clients did not make the list because they did not reach the required 0.1% threshold. These include Tribler, Frostwire, Tixati, tTorrent, aTorrent, and PicoTorrent. It is noted that these clients may still have thousands of active users daily.
The same applies to various versions of Popcorn Time, which has attracted attention from the media, copyright holders, and users for many years. None of the Popcorn Time forks identifying themselves as “web-torrent” made it onto the list.
The journalists state that they plan to continue monitoring statistics and publishing similar rankings in the future.