So I am planning on buying an ipad, never owned one before. I have always been an android guy and from what I have heard Ipad os or ios is pretty restrictive in nature so I was wondering how much does it hamper the piracy experience. For example on android I can torrent files of any nature or size without any restrictions and sideload the apk’s of paid apps to enjoy them for free, can I still do all this on an ipad or should I just drop the idea and get an android tablet instead ?

  • Stremio, Realdebrid and Infuse is what I use for streaming movies and series on our iPad and Apple TV’s. I mostly use the iPad though for making music, or as a controller for my home studio with very low latency. I like the cleaner UI and no ads.

    I guess though for what you want the Android experience is better suited, even watching torrents on Apple is jumping through hoops although it works solid after configuration. My son uses an iPad since a few weeks and was surprised how useful it is, using PC, Google TV and Android phone.

  • I sideload apps on my ipad pro, but as others have stated, it’s nowhere near as straightforward as doing so on Android. I mainly decided to do it after my wife continued to spend $$ on “coins” and “gold bars” for Candy Crush on her ipad. It was cheaper for me to buy a developer account and sideload modded versions that have unlimited coins, etc. She’s stuck in the apple ecosystem, even though I did try giving her and Android tablet to try out.

    If you decide to try sideloading on IOS devices, and you spend the $99 for a developer account, I recommend using Sideloadly or something like Altstore to sideload apps to your device vs. a service that requires you to provide your certificates from your developer account to attach it to their ecosystem. Maybe some are legit and won’t compromise your developer account credentials, but I prefer standalone tools that I self host, for security reasons. They are more work thought.

    A compromise might be to use a services like Singulous that sells you a “slot” on a developer account for $10-20. The problem with those is they periodically get revoked and your sideloaded apps must be reloaded. For more info, you might look at reddit /r sideloaded.

    Best of luck!

  • Overall the ipad is pretty limited but I’ve found this method useful for videos specifically. Basically you use a debrid service as a torrent downloader, and then you download the file directly from them and save it on your ipad.

    You need a real-debrid account or similar. Most people on piracy forums freak out that any part of piracy cost money. I thought the same when i was a broke teen. But if you have the dough, it’s ~3€ a month to make it way easier.

    With real debrid you copy magnet links from torrent sites and download them through real debrid. For some stupid reason you can’t copy the magnet link from your favorite torrent websites on Safari in iOS. There used to be a “Shortcuts” script that worked but not last time I checked, so i end up having to do this from my computer or ask a buddy who’s on a computer. Once you get the magnet link to a torrent, you go to the torrent tab in real-debrid and paste the link/upload the torrent file. Most of the time the file is already cached by RD and become available immediately. Then you can download and play with VLC. If filed are zipped, use an unzipper there are a few. Good way to load up on movies/shows before flights, and VLC handles subtitles.

  • iPad works more like a terminal environment than a standalone device. Don’t expect running piracy software directly on it, but you get a pretty good experience connecting to your home server.