Kim Dotcom's Mega cloud storage service gets an official iPhone app
Now that Kim Dotcom's cloud storage service Mega is available to the public, it's finally found time to launch the iOS app it's been promising. With its Android app already four months old, the new Mega iPhone app includes …
Context & Ripple Effects
Mega has been racing to become a real multi-platform service since its January 2013 launch, which came exactly one year after the Megaupload-era shutdown made Kim Dotcom the most scrutinized name in cloud storage — and the service signed up more than a million members within days. The iOS app closes the gap with an Android client that shipped four months earlier, notable given that commentary in October 2013 argued 'Android first' rollouts are a myth among serious consumer startups.
The move lands in a crowded iOS cloud field: Amazon put a stake down with its Cloud Drive Photos app for iPhone back in May 2013. It also comes at a transitional moment for the company itself — Dotcom resigned as a Mega director in September 2013 to focus on his music venture, leaving the service he founded to prove it can operate as a product company rather than a personality.
First-order effects
- iPhone owners gain native access to Mega's encrypted storage, ending the four-month window in which Android users had a first-class client and iOS users did not.
- Mega now fields matching clients on the two dominant mobile platforms, letting it compete for mainstream cloud-storage signups rather than early adopters willing to use the browser.
Second-order effects
- Competitors like Amazon's Cloud Drive face a rival whose pitch is end-to-end encryption rather than price or ecosystem lock-in, forcing the category to answer the security question, not just the gigabyte question.
- With Dotcom stepped back from the director role, Mega's ability to ship on schedule without him becomes the test of whether the brand can outlive its founder's legal and media baggage.
Third-order effects
- If encrypted-first consumer clouds keep gaining mainstream distribution via official app stores, the legacy of the 2012 Megaupload raid hardens into an industry pattern: privacy positioning as a feature, not just a compliance posture.
- A confirmed plan to run an encrypted email service on non-US servers suggests the longer arc is jurisdictional arbitrage — data services marketing their distance from US legal reach as a product attribute.
The trend: Consumer cloud storage is splitting between ecosystem-locked incumbents and encrypted upstarts racing to cover both mobile platforms, with the Megaupload aftermath pushing privacy itself into the sales pitch.