Downburst: File Manager

Downburst is a download manager for iPhone and iPad that shows you the weather. Paste a link and the file starts falling. The whole queue is one screen: current speed as rainfall, a live graph of the last 45 seconds, and every transfer with its own progress, ETA and stream count. You can tell at a glance whether things are going well. CLOUDBURST Big files arrive in up to four parallel streams instead of one. Downburst opens byte ranges, checks the server honours them, pulls the parts at the same time and stitches them back together on arrival. Servers that do not support ranges fall back to a single stream without fuss. RESUME THAT ACTUALLY RESUMES Pause anything and pick it up later, byte for byte. Lose Wi-Fi mid-transfer and the queue waits for connectivity rather than starting over. Failures back off and retry on their own at 5s, 15s, 45s, 2m and 4m, then stop bothering you. IT KEEPS GOING WHEN YOU LEAVE Downloads continue while the app is closed, because they run on the system background transfer service rather than a timer that dies with the app. A Live Activity counts down on your Lock Screen and Dynamic Island, a Home Screen widget shows the queue, and a notification tells you when a file lands. THE INLET Paste a whole wall of text and Downburst pulls every link out of it. Each one gets a pre-flight check before it joins the queue: the real filename, the real size, and whether it can be resumed. Untick the ones you did not mean to grab. ARCHIVES, UNPACKED ZIP and RAR extract themselves when they land, multi-part sets included. Password-protected archives ask once, and remembered passwords live in the device keychain so the next one opens without asking. WATCH IT HERE Tap a video and it plays: hold to speed up, double tap to skip, drag for brightness and volume, pinch to fill, rotate with one tap even with the rotation lock on, pull it down by its top edge and keep browsing while it plays in a bar above the tabs. Subtitles from sidecar files or inside the file, chapters, a sleep timer, an A to B loop, AirPlay, Picture in Picture and Lock Screen controls. MP4, MOV and M4V play natively; MKV, AVI, WebM, FLV, TS, OGG and Opus play through VideoLAN's own engine, and Chromecast goes through it too. It remembers where you stopped. EVERYTHING LANDS IN FILES Finished downloads go to On My iPhone, Downburst, Downloads, visible in the Files app, or to any folder you choose there, iCloud Drive included, where a file uploads only once it has fully landed. Sorting rules file them into folders by type or by name. Preview them in place, zoom through images, share them onward, or find them from the Home Screen with Spotlight. A checksum published beside a file is checked on arrival. YOURS TO TUNE Set how many downloads run at once and how many connections may hit any one server. Allow or block cellular, or mark one enormous download Wi-Fi only. Servers that ask for a login get one, kept in your device's keychain and sent only to them. Lock the app behind Face ID. AT HOME ON EVERY SCREEN Two columns on iPad. Hold, release and check the queue from Shortcuts and Siri, or from buttons on the widget. Every control has a name for VoiceOver, every size follows Dynamic Type, and the rain holds still for Reduce Motion. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO Downburst downloads files from direct links. It does not save media from streaming or social platforms, and those hosts are blocked in the app by design. There are no torrents and no plugins. Download only what you own or have the rights to save. FREE, AND STAYING FREE Every feature above is in the free app: no paid tiers, no trials, nothing held back. Settings has an optional tip jar, and it unlocks nothing. No account, no analytics, no adverts, no tracking. Nothing you download passes through a server of mine, because there is not one.