It’s a sad day for the fans of mobile torrent tracker SyncTheBits (StB). After being online for more than two years, StB has finally shut down, possibly for ever. According to Reese, StB’s owner and administrator, lack of activity and continuous lack of donations were the primary reasons that prompted the shut down. Many existing members were no doubt surprised by the move, considering StB only recently rolled out v2 of the site, a massive overhaul to which quite a lot of effort was put into. StB v2 was based on Gazelle and it truly was a well organized, great looking torrent site which had a lot of potential. Either way the site is now gone and it’s unlikely to return (as a private tracker) – however, a temporary forum has been set up to discuss the possibility of a resurrection, perhaps in the form of a DDL forum.

The paragraph below explains the reasons for shut down – this was quoted from a post made by Reese on the temporary forums:

This week it became clear to me that STB will not be able to support its self and i can no longer put my own money into the site to keep it afloat. So im sorry to announce that STB the tracker as we have known for the last 2 years is gone. Im sorry.

I have created this forum to get feedback from some of our users that were very active at the site to see if there is any interest in keeping this forum online and building STB around a forum based community..

Please give me any feedback or ideas that you guys have.

The only thing I am ruling out is a Torrent Tracker since we have tried that and it did not work out.

At the time of its closure, StB tracked around 4000 torrents and had ~2500 registered members - it was one of the oldest and largest mobile trackers in existence. To read more on the launch of StB v2 and to see how this tracker looked when it was online, please refer to this article.

StB is not the only specialized mobile tracker to shut down in the recent past. Quite a few similar sites including Mobile.SceneLinks, PimpYourMobile, etc had closed down, indicating that BitTorrent is not so popular when it came to sharing mobile applications, games, themes, etc. There are now only a handful private mobile trackers left, such as PMTorrents, PODTropolis, JAF, etc. DDL forums on the other hand have gained huge popularity in this niche. However, if StB does come back as a DDL forum, it’ll still have to face competition from existing mobile communities such as DOTSiS, IPMart-Forum, PDA4X, etc who are established players in this arena. Anyways R.I.P. – let’s hope the site returns, in one form or the other.

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