Popcorn Time, the once popular app for making pirating as easy as Netflix, has switch off. Its original developer discontinued the service and gave up the project just days after it started in 2014. But since the project was open source, other developers were able to pick up where they left off, and it has been killed and resurrected a couple of times since then. It remains to be seen if Popcorn Time is now over for good, but it looks like the biggest contributor to its recent demise is the dwindling interest in the app.
The developers posted a graph of searches for “popcorn time” over the past seven years on their website. While the app received a ton of searches in the months following its launch in 2015, the graph shows a sharp drop in interest through 2016. Its popularity continued to decline and never really recovered after that, at least based on Google Trends.
According to Bloomberg, the group behind Popcorn Time announced their closure in an email. While they didn’t say whether law enforcement was a factor in their decision to close the app this time around, Popcorn Time has had the law in the past. The original version may have closed after authorities intervened, and even Hollywood studios sued individual users who allegedly illegally downloaded and shared copies of films.
Developers previously affiliated with Popcorn Time talked about that they are not responsible for piracy themselves as the service does not host any content. Instead, it relied on a peer-to-peer sharing system and only allowed users to access content hosted on other people’s computers.
Publisher’s Note: This article originally appeared on Engadget.
