Olga Petrova

I do investigative tech reporting from Berlin, focused on Russian-language Mac software distribution — who runs the catalogues, who funds them, what regulators do about them, and why some brands last a decade while others vanish in eighteen months. AppStorrent is one of the longest-running cases in that landscape.

Background

I started reporting on Russian-language tech in 2012 for a Berlin-based investigative magazine, where I ran the digital-rights beat for six years. That work covered everything from RuTracker takedowns to the Yandex/Google rivalry, and increasingly the smaller corners of the Russian-language Mac ecosystem that mainstream English-language tech press never touched.

Since 2021 I have written independently, splitting time between long-form investigative pieces for European tech publications and English-language reference work on the brands my Russian-language reporting keeps surfacing. AppStorrent Guide is my English-language investigative read on the Mac torrent brand that has survived a decade of regulatory pressure and a hundred clones.

Areas of focus

How I approach this work

The investigative pieces I write here start with the questions careful readers should actually be asking about the brands my Russian-language reporting surfaces — who runs them, who funds them, what regulators do, why some last and others vanish — and answer them with documentary evidence rather than the moralising that usually surrounds anything torrent-adjacent. Where the topic intersects with Russian regulatory pressure, EU sideloading reform, or platform licensing, I name the constraint and let readers decide.

I do not host downloads, mirror catalogues, or take any commercial relationship with the sites I write about. The model on this site is editorial only: longer-form investigative reference pages on the Mac software ecosystem, kept current as the underlying brands and regulators move.

Timeline

Selected writing