FrostWire Is Still Alive

While exploring the world of BitTorrent with Zig, I stumbled across this old relic from days past. I guess many above a certain age will still remember FrostWire. For some time (and of course I can only speak for my little part of the world) it was the premiere file sharing program everyone was using. I don’t remember exactly when it was, but it must have been 2005-ish. In any case, I was definitely not expecting FrostWire to still be alive!

Just head over to their GitHub. There’s still activity, and not just trivial activity from bots or README updates. Now, thing is, back then Git was not a thing. Let alone GitHub. There also was no Maven and most certainly no Gradle (which FrostWire now uses). It also has an Android client now. Android wasn’t a thing either! Although even Git is a youngster compared to Android. I don’t know what that makes FrostWire. A Greybeard or something.¹

Someone must have put in all the work to keep the FrostWire code decently up-to-date!

Obviously, I installed it. What a throwback. FrostWire is a pure BitTorrent client now. Apparently, it lost its Gnutella roots at some point. Also, to be fair, the UI did not age very well. It does still look like a Java GUI app that fell out of the mid 2000s, at least on Linux. Nevertheless. It is a thing, it can be installed, and it runs without hassle.

It is also still free and open source. At least the version I installed seemed unencumbered with shady “add-ons” . Unfortunately these old, once popular programs often end up as crapware taken over by some leeches sucking the soul out of the last remaining users. FrostWire seems to have some history flirting with this as well though.

“But there’s a lot of old software still well maintained. What’s the big deal?”, you might say. And that’s right. FrostWire just doesn’t strike me as the kind of software that would be well maintained today. It’s a boring old Java app. It passed its prime for way longer than it ever was popular by now. The user base of FrostWire must be tiny. P2P filesharing in general is already much less prominent than it used to be. I do think P2P filesharing might have a come back in some way or another, but it’s very unlikely FrostWire will be the client of choice then. Despite all that someone must put in their (probably unpaid) time to maintain it. And it is not just maintained, it is well maintained.

Surely, there are some die-hard FrostWire users out there and I am rooting for them. I know the feeling of being attached to a piece of software all to well. It’s a beautiful thing if you think about it. So most of all this is a tribute to one of those tireless maintainers, somewhere in the world, silently jugging along, doing their thing, for almost two decades.

Chapeau!