Download torrents on Android with uTorrent
I’ve written about my desire to see centrally located ROM distribution go away for a while now, but even as a proponent of torrenting via Android, I really haven’t investigated many clients that work on the device – just those that control a torrent client at home. I rarely had a need to torrent anything directly to my phone until I needed to make a bootable recovery USB image with no working computer and horrible cell service. Enter my savior: µTorrent.
µTorrent is a BitTorrent client for Android that works with .torrent files and magnet links, and even has some built-in search capabilities. It is absurdly useful when you have to get the file no matter the connection, no matter the speed, no matter how long it takes; the client will just keep finding trackers, peers, and seeds, and keep pulling that data correctly for you. If your phone dies in the middle of a transfer, it’ll pick right back up when you have it on later.
If you absolutely have to have the file and are willing to risk your carrier’s wrath, you can download via any connection – 3G, 4G, WiMAX, LTE, or WiFi. If you’re not willing to tread into that territory, it does have a WiFi-only mode that will only pop on and download when you’re in WiFi coverage.
If the torrent you’re downloading has multiple files, you can also choose to not download any you don’t need to save bandwidth and time.
There are some features missing from the full-featured desktop torrent clients, such as no options to play a torrent while it’s downloading. But for me that’s not a dealbreaker, as I’m not into downloading movies or videos to watch on my phone. However it does contain the option to subscribe to RSS feeds of torrents so that your favorite group’s videos will be there and available for you when you get a chance to view them, without any interaction on your part.
All in all it’s a pretty useful tool that’s going in my ROM to ROM toolbag. Now if I can just convince some developers to stop hosting everything exclusively on large single failure point servers, we’re set.
One thing to note with this, the “u” in µTorrent is actually a “µ” in the program name. This character ranks higher than Z in the alphabet set we use, so you’ll find µTorrent somewhere after your Words With Friends and Yelp. It won’t be under the U section if your apps are sorted alphabetically.
Download: Google Play
What did you mean by “If you absolutely have to have the file and are willing to risk your carrier’s wrath, you can download via any connection – 3G, 4G, WiMAX, WiFi, etc.”?
There have been a few forum posts in which people have claimed their cell phone provider either called them up or cut off their service for torrenting.
There are usually vague clauses in the carrier contracts that define that as abusive abnormal behavior as generally there’s no reason for an Android to make 200 connections and push data out like mad
Thanks for the info. So if I want to torrent then I should stick to my computer? Also what is an easy phone to root and S-Off and anything else? I want to start but it’s so confusing.
all phones are pretty easy to root and S-OFF (if applicable) after a month or so of being out. The better question is what do you want in a phone, then we can check and see if the phone you want is easy or hard.
I have an EVO LTE, but I think I’m going to start with a lower end phone that I still think is amazing, the OG EVO. And I want to try to get android 4.2 as a higher target and 4.0 as a minimum. Is this possible.
I’ve used this in the past, but found it to be so slow that it was practically useless – and that’s on the same WiFi connection that allows me to download several gigs in a few minutes using a desktop torrent program to download the same torrents. I don’t know what it is about the Android app, but it’s awful.
I used it in the past (when it first came out I think)and it was terrible also. They updated it June 19th, I had to get a 300 meg ISO recovery disk and managed to get it in about 10 minutes.
Not as fast as the desktop client would have gotten it, but it worked great for what I needed it for.
It is, however, limited by the SD write speed so if you didn’t have write caching set up it’s a good chance you were limited by that.
Also if your wifi was not in high performance mode it was getting data at much slower speeds.
So would using utorrent on my fiance’s GSIII to download and upload an insane amount of data be a viable way to get out of a Sprint contract?
My bet is you’ll find out that abuse of network costs you the ETF
I’ve used this program from the beginning and I’ve never really had many problems with it. While i’m at work I use their Wifi to download comics, TV shows and the occasional albums. I find it to be pretty fast and on the rare chance that I did download a movie it go to me pretty quickly. I definitely recommend this app.
I downloaded an epub file to utorrent on my note 2 however when Ii try to play it a message appears.
Your device can t play this type of file. Please help. Thanks.
Download a book reader, mine is Aldiko om my play store. Go then to your files directory and then your download folder choose the epub fokder and thrn op r n.
You have can’t open a file like an epub by simply clicking on it on your phone. You have to go into the program that deals with it and open it from that. Same with most file types on your phone.
For example i use fbreader to read my books on my phone but i have to open books using fbreader to find them.
If the torrent you’re downloading has multiple files, you can also choose to not download any you don’t need to save bandwidth and time.
How?