Blockchain company TRON, which owns BitTorrent, has struck a deal with Huawei to add the file-sharing app to the latter’s app store. Four variations of the BitTorrent app, including uTorrent and uTorrent Pro, have gained a place in Huawei’s AppGallery, its equivalent of Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Play Store or Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) App Store.
Huawei is the world’s largest telecom manufacturer, and the second largest smartphone maker after Samsung. As a result, the partnership is a major boost for TRON and BitTorrent, potentially placing its application in the hands of up to three billion users in 170 countries.
BitTorrent Extends Its Mobile Reach
BitTorrent is the world’s largest file-sharing network, and has been reinvigorated following its takeover and subsequent tokenization by TRON. Led by the ebullient Justin Sun, who is also the CEO of BitTorrent, TRON is a blockchain ecosystem focused on delivering entertainment to consumers in all its forms, from live-streaming to micro-blogging. It’s achieved this through a series of acquisitions and takeovers, including BitTorrent, video platform dLive, and Steemit.
Android users who own Huawei devices will now be able to access BitTorrent directly from the built-in app store and utilize its torrenting capabilities. From the perspective of BitTorrent, the integration will help to grow its user base of 100 million. From the perspective of TRON, it’s another step towards placing crypto-powered applications in the hands of billions. Huawei’s 5G phones have proved a hit in the firm’s native China and across the Asian market, where they enjoy the sort of dominance comparable with that of the iPhone in the West.
TRON Ecosystem Expands
The Huawei deal isn’t the first of this kind to have been struck by TRON; earlier this year it partnered with Samsung, bringing several of its decentralized apps (dApps) into the South Korean manufacturer’s Galaxy Store. A TRON wallet was also incorporated. In the eyes of Justin Sun, though, the Huawei deal is bigger still.
“This is another huge milestone for TRON and BitTorrent to be listed by one of the largest Android manufacturers in the world,” said the TRON founder. “We are excited to see the blossoming universe of distributed networks grow via Huawei devices and technology.”
While most of the users installing the BitTorrent app on Android will be concerned with its ability to support high speed downloads, the underlying blockchain infrastructure is a core component. This takes the form of BitTorrent File System, which enables developers of TRON applications to access distributed storage, ensuring that the dApps they release are truly decentralized.
Advocates of web3 technology believe that the internet of the future will be self-sovereign and distributed. In other words, individuals will be responsible for storing and accessing their data, rather than entrusting it to centralized tech giants. If this model comes to pass, it will be reliant upon networks such as BTFS and Bluzelle to provision distributed storage cheaply and at scale.
Disclosure: This Op-Ed is written by Reuben Jackson. Insider Monkey News Department isn’t involved in the production of this article.
