An Android application that offers free streams of films, television series and live sport has passed 305 million downloads on a single app store, and has been reported to the European Commission for inclusion on next year's Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List.
Both the Motion Picture Association and the French television company Canal+ named MovieBox as a large piracy operation in their submissions for the 2027 list, and both highlighted the same distribution channel.
In its overview of piracy apps, the MPA noted that MovieBox had been downloaded more than 243 million times from Palm Store alone. Palm Store is the app store that comes preinstalled on Tecno, Infinix and itel phones, brands belonging to the Chinese handset maker Transsion, which sold 61.5 per cent of all mobile phones in Africa in 2024 according to its own filings.
Canal+ supplied more detail. "As of 16 June 2026, PalmStore reported approximately 243.3 million MovieBox application downloads, representing growth of approximately 108% since August 2025, with MovieBox continuing to rank as the number one application in the Entertainment category on the PalmStore platform," it wrote.
That count is already out of date. At the time of writing Palm Store lists 305.6 million downloads for the app, an increase of more than 60 million in less than four months.
The app has survived enforcement before. Nigeria's copyright watchdog celebrated the suspension of MovieBox.ng last year; the site moved to a new domain and the Android app remained widely available. Canal+ notes that it switched to moviebox.ph after action against the .ng domain in 2025, and continued to grow after the switch.
The store listing makes no attempt at ambiguity. It promotes movies, television series and live sports, with a specific mention of Europe's five biggest leagues. "Enjoy free access to sports live streams right in our app," the description reads.
Palm Store is not an independent marketplace. In a draft prospectus for a planned Hong Kong listing, Transsion describes it as its own app distribution platform, which had more than 180 million monthly active users on average last year. Canal+, for its part, owns MultiChoice, the pay-television company behind DStv, which operates in the same African markets.
Neither submission mentions whether anyone has asked Palm Store or Transsion to remove the app.
Before the Commission decides, the services reported to it are offered a chance to answer. "The Commission will also make reasonable efforts to contact the service providers reported in the submissions and invite them to respond in writing to the allegations made against them," the consultation document reads. The new list is expected in the spring of next year, and the Commission notes that a mention would not be a finding of wrongdoing or a confirmation of legal violations: it is meant to encourage operators and governments to take action against infringement.
Read the two submissions together and a ranking problem comes into view. MovieBox is the number one application in the Entertainment category of a store with more than 180 million monthly active users. It is also, as of this week, a candidate for a list.
The list is the only chart it has not yet won.
And the list, on the Commission's own description, confers nothing whatever. A mention is not a finding of wrongdoing. It is not a confirmation of a legal violation. It is an encouragement, addressed to operators and governments, to do something.
So the two submissions propose, between them, to answer 305.6 million downloads with an entry. On the figures supplied by the rightsholders themselves, the entry is the smaller number.
The growth rate makes the arithmetic worse rather than better. Downloads rose about 108 per cent in the ten months to June, and by more than 60 million in the four months since. The 2027 list is due in the spring. Whatever figure it prints will be wrong by several tens of millions on the day of publication, in the direction that matters.
The Department of Unnecessary Research notes that MovieBox has reached first place in Entertainment without any assistance from Brussels, and that the European Commission is now proposing to rank it as well.