I'm gona keep shouting this from the rooftops and maybe it will eventually sink in for some people:
Apple's end game is vertical integration, it's "lock-in" on steroids. When they own every product or service in the stack, they can tune one product (like podcasts) to serve the purposes of another, even when it appears to hurt a product and it's users individually, because it benefits Apple as a whole.
I get that Apple stuff is generally a nice experience and there is genuinely lots of cool technology, but people need to understand the future they are buying into with Apple. The deeper someone gets, the more painful it's going to be when that table flip moment comes, because that table has the weight of the whole Apple ecosystem holding it down - and so people will unconsciously endure much pain before doing so (lest they lose access to their podcasts); If that table flip moment comes with a competitor for an _individual_ service like this one, it's going to be a tiny inconvenience, and so users will endure less, and the product owner has more market pressure to provide a good service as the friction to change is low.
Those passionate about Apple will argue with individual counter examples, but the core issue is the broader strategy that does not have user interests at heart. It's honestly heartbreaking as someone who grew up with and loved Apple computers, they hung onto the concept of holism from the 80s in making the whole computer and it has produced some excellent machines. But now the same strategy is being twisted into something that actively works against the user instead.
They’ve been benevolent and haven’t cracked down on things. They let basically any podcast in for free. They let 3rd party clients use their directory for free.
They ARE the podcast industry. And they’ve been open.
I see this purely as a reaction to Spotify and Google and others trying to grab and control the industry with private “podcasts” that can only be listened to in their custom app.
They’re trying not to be shoved out. And they’re big enough to be able to hold it.
It would be great if 3rd party apps on iOS could access your podcast subscriptions.
But this is way better to me than standing by and letting Spotify or whoever destroy the industry.
(I subscribe to podcasts, but not through Apple since I can’t use my preferred app, Overcast).
> They ARE the podcast industry. And they’ve been open.
Hmmm is this really true? I've been listening to podcasts since 2012ish which puts me fairly early in the adoption curve and I've never used iTunes once (always been PocketCasts on Android).
Anyway, just another f'ing reason to NOT go all-in on Apple. Apple Podcasts kinda sucks? The few times I do use it as a directory to grab a link to send to a iOS-using friend, i just hate it. Search sucks, linking to a specific episode sucks, discoverability sucks.
I love my '22 M1 MBP I get from work, but it's the only Apple device I own. I just cannot stand this type of closed-system tactics, especially when their offering is so much worse than alternatives (don't get me started on iMessage or Safari)
This also doesn't help them compete with Spotify anyway, since they use their own directory and hosting system. The only ones hurt here are third-party clients and end users. The ones you think they're trying to "protect".
But all the numerous other free directories, I doubt they are all sourced from Apple. The non-Apple podcast hosting services provide RSS feeds. Self-hosted podcasts usually provide RSS feeds. Anyone can use these feeds, not just Apple.
Personally I think Apple's directory, as accessed via www, is inferior to some of the alternatives. For example, it does not list all episodes, only the most recent ones.
If I want a definitive podcast index, I go to the source of podcasts for the RSS feeds or just .mp3 URLs, not to Apple. (Apple appears to prefer .m4a to .mp3)
Most podcasts are not hosted on Apple servers. Apple is just retrieving XML files from someone else.
It sure would be nice though if instead of just praising podcasts as they have been, if there were open solutions to various problems open podcasts face that are not shared by closed ecosystems: There is still no good way to share a link or a clip for instance, unless the podcast app bakes its own (which will not work with other apps). There should be RSS syncing back-ends not tied to any one app as well.
Huh. I never knew that Apple invented RSS feeds and hosting an mp3 file at a URL. Because that's all a podcast is.
This is demonstrable not true. From the time that iTunes first introduced podcast support in iTunes back in 2004 until today, you host your RSS feed on your own site and iTunes indexes your RSS feed. But you still host your own audio that gets served off of your own site.
Not only that, Apple has had a public documented API that doesn’t need any keys that you can use to basically get any information from the index since 2006.
Third party podcast apps use the API.
If your podcast isn’t listed on iTunes, you can still subscribe to the RSS feed of the podcast directly if you know the url.
If you publish a URL on your website, by default it will open in the podcast app.
This is much different than the podcast in name only monstrosity that Spotify has
On the other hand, the Apple podcast app has always sucked and I use Overcast.
Yes you can pretty easily have paid podcasts outside of Apple .
To the first approximation, no one is dumb enough to use Apple’s paid podcast offering and uses a third party one or roll their own with dedicated urls because they realize the number of third party clients available and they have no relationship with the customer.
And in general I've stopped adopting Apple-originated software entirely, weaned myself off of most of that which I had adopted, and have largely rid myself of anything macOS-only even from 3rd parties. iOS is what I'm taking an inventory of next.
I may continue to buy Apple hardware. They've shown up here well enough that I can ignore minor misgivings about cost and upgradability/repairability/recovery. But the software ecosystem just seems like a gilded cage in the best case, and that's ignoring the signals that this is company that trades in digital experiences & economics rather than the old-fashioned bicycles for the mind. We're well beyond the "PCs are trucks" thing and into "we sell the experience of owning a new sedan every 2 years."
Just to screw with their old marketing: The bicycle is now trying to drive the mind - you want to go left but it keeps gradually, imperceptibly, steering you right - for some people as soon as they feel that force feedback through the handlebars it causes an autonomic response, recoiling in fear as the tool they previously trusted seems to have a mind of it's own... Some other hidden force in the machine is competing with your decisions. Yet the majority of people don't seem to have this response, perhaps it's earned, I don't know.
Can't speak for all Apple users, but the way a lot of my friends talk about their phones - it is crystal clear they think they're better than you if you don't have an iPhone.
I imagine this subset of users would be glad that people without iPhones can't listen to podcasts.
I think they're aware of what they're buying into and like it.
I’ve never heard an adult I interact with express that. My Android using friends don’t care.
This is actually kind of antithetical to your point. Apple Pay interoperates with all conventional point of sale systems. It's a PCI compliant, certified, contactless EMV payment device. You can use it anywhere you see the contactless EMV logo. There are standards actually about where that logo should be placed on the payment terminal to minimize confusion.
As for how to hold it, you're going to actually have less trouble figuring that out as compared to a passive card since passive cards have to be positioned a lot more accurately within the field - because physics.
There's a lot of examples of what you're describing but this isn't one.
It's pretty obvious, it says "tap to pay" and has the logo on it?
The scarier thing they have is other users' loyalty on phones. Android has the same. I feel like nobody switches between the two anymore like the older days, and there was a distinct time when they switched from making what the user might want to deciding what the user wants. So both players do anti-consumer stuff in lock-step like removing headphone jacks to sell more accessories. I don't mind holding onto an old phone to avoid that, but there's a limit. AT&T stopped serving my iPhone 5.
not looking forward to it.
When Google or MS or someone else builds a better experience then we can move.
Google shuts things down like there’s no tomorrow. MS can’t release a product beyond 3 countries. No one makes headphones like Apple.
You can argue till you’re blue in the face that all the sound quality of every other brand is better. But I’m so tired of having to re-pair headphones on every device.
Can argue that android phones a better cos of this feature and that feature but the moment you install some apps the battery drains, there’s less consistency, apps want my credit card directly.
I’ve been spending years pushing back against Apple for being overpriced but the overall experience is just better.
I doubt apps can stay on the playstore after asking for card details in a form. Google wants their cut too
I’m getting rid of my MacBook because macOS is going down the shitter (another topic entirely). On a related note, I needed a second Mac in order to restore my MacBook, that is, remove the beta version of macOS Ventura I was running awhile ago to go back to a stable (“stable”) version. So yeah, the game is to get everyone to have to buy iPhones every couple of years whether there are any significant improvements or not. What can the iPhone 14 do that the iPhone 12 can’t? Absolutely fucking nothing.
But I also totally dislike what is happening now with movie streaming I pay for a couple of platforms, and if I want to watch something, I start opening them one by one and search of that movie. Moreso when a tv series that I started watching on one platform suddenly migrates to another one so I have to follow it between platforms.
I start seeing that with podcasts: some of them launched only on other platforms and now I have to install 4-5 podcast apps on my phone and keep track of all of them when something new appears. From an Apple user perspective, I like that I have on app Podcasts where I go and can listen to the latest episode from my favorite podcasts.
You hate it when you have to use different/specific apps to get access to certain content. Apple is making it so that a bunch of people will be forced to use apple's app to get certain podcasts. It sounds like apple is making the problem you dislike worse for many people, but since it isn't impacting you personally as an apple user you don't mind it?
It turns out that if you put a from in water and raise the termperature slowly, they jump out exactly when they can no longer maintain homeostasis. Not everything can be manipulated by making change slow enough. Sometimes there are bifurcations.
All of a sudden their ecosystem opened up. You could run windows on your solid apple hardware. People had more choices and agency.
The author presents this as "audacity" and bad... but doesn't it make perfect sense? If you're charging a subscription fee then it makes sense that the podcast lives in a walled DRM'ed garden. Also, if Apple is hosting it for nearly free ($20/year is nothing), why would you expect Apple to make it available to competing podcast apps? If you post something on TikTok it doesn't show up on people's Facebook feeds.
Apple isn't taking away self-hosted RSS podcast feeds. It's presenting a separate paid subscription experience within its Podcasts app. No "audacity" about it. If you don't want that as a creator, don't use it.
> If you're charging a subscription fee
The DRM applies even if you charge no fee.
> why would you expect Apple to make it available to competing podcast apps
Because every single other podcast hosting service does, with the exception of folks that signed a contract with Spotify.
> If you post something on TikTok it doesn't show up on people's Facebook feeds.
It can, actually. You can post a link. If I upload a podcast to Apple, it's physically inaccessible unless you have a Mac or an iOS device.
> Apple isn't taking away self-hosted RSS podcast feeds.
That was never the point, and not my concern. What they're doing is tricking small podcasters into signing up for a cheap service that prevents them from ever leaving.
This is crap, but it’s not because the deal Apple is offering to podcasters is crap: $20/year hosting and distribution into the biggest podcast ecosystem that exists with the option to charge a premium and keep 70%; it’s because they’re trying to turn their Podcast app into YouTube for Podcasts with an App Store model which is just on its face total crap. The fix is to find a different hosting provider and decline the services Apple is offering you.
Unless I am misunderstanding your claim, this is not true.
You can listen to Apple Podcasts using iTunes for Windows. You can also listen to them on Android. But dealing with it on Android is indeed annoying, because it requires downloading podcasts in itunes on your desktop, and then manually transferring them to your Android phone after finding the locally stored files.
However, it is easy to sidestep all of that if the podcast creator just uploads to multiple podcast hosting platforms.
I'm curious if this sort of arrangement will remain in place in Europe once the DMA interoperability requirements come into effect.
Thank you. This is important to call out this, as DRM a paid episode seems a practical solution, but DRM free episode is absolutely taking aways reasonable options from creators and audiences.
It sounded to me like the audacious part was that they don't make it clear that, once you sign up for this service, your users cannot get your podcast in any other way than using Apple Podcasts, and you will never be able to change that. The audacious part is this:
> They say that your podcast will be available to listeners on Apple Podcasts, but they don’t explicitly say that your podcast won’t be available to anyone else. When you upload your audio, they say it will have DRM, but they don’t make it clear what the consequences of this are. They tell you your show won’t have an RSS feed, but they don’t tell you what you’re giving up by not having one. This is predatory.
Which, I agree with the author, is a really, really wild thing to do, which few companies could think they'd get away with. You can just imagine a PM saying "ayy, they don't like it? screw 'em, we're Apple!"
You definitely can.
What the author said was, "What I learned is that Apple does not produce an RSS feed for podcasts that they host". But this is misplaced outrage on the author's part, since Apple has never produced RSS feeds.
I confused what possible definition of 'Digital Rights Management' could entail 'anyone can freely rip your files.'
No, it absolutely does not. In the same way it doesn't make any sense to have DRM on music or anything else I pay for. I'm a paying customer, why should my experience and the product I'm paying for literally be worse then the people who pirate it? This thinking is straight out of the 90s/00s RIAA playbook that Apple themselves played a major role in tearing down! Normal podcast systems charge money and make things member-only just fine with normal RSS and standard sound. If someone wants to save one they got while paying to listen to again later so what?
>Also, if Apple is hosting it for nearly free ($20/year is nothing), why would you expect Apple to make it available to competing podcast apps?
"Nearly" isn't actually free. It's a paid service, and it's for something that's "nearly free" to provide too by that argument. Why shouldn't it just be standard, with a bit of Apple polish in the interface and tooling and some options for users to add Apple as an intermediary for privacy if they want? This is a dumb, good-will burning approach for peanuts. Anything Apple gets from this isn't worth even having a front page story on HN and a few thousand people noticing and getting just a little bit more irritated. It's a symptom of a company that isn't thinking as holistically as it once did, or more charitably this is such an unimportant thing that it didn't actually get any serious attention and they just built it in a proprietary lazy way out of their current defaults I guess.
You're not buying it, you're renting it. A subscription is a monthly payment, you will no longer have paid access once you choose to stop paying for it. It has DRM for the same reason Spotify, Apple Music, et al. use DRM.
Podcast hosting for $20/year is a huge bargain. Libsyn's cheapest plan is $5/month with limits on storage. Add in the fact that you're published by one of the largest podcast directories on earth and the value is immense.
Additionally, the author complains that an Apple Podcast user has to go through the app (and all its restrictions), but again, not that different from Instagram posts. As a user, you must go through Instagram to see photos. These users aren't there just for generic hosting, but also for the network effects. For those that want generic hosting, there are other more appropriate services, like google photos or maybe Flickr (or self hosting).
I'm not arguing the Podcasts/Instagram model is better, just that there is fairly old precedent, so the purported shock value seems pretty low.
If there are podcast hosts who don't hold onto their original audio files they had before uploading them, then what are they thinking? That's like sending a project to a client and then deleting your own copy of it.
I understand that the author tries to provide an "import from Apple Podcasts" service for convenience, but that's merely a convenience. It really shouldn't be too hard for a podcaster to just re-upload their original audio files and descriptions to a new service. Nobody's "locked in" to anything here as far as I can tell.
Because you don't want your audience to be captured by Apple, who can extract rents based on their artificially mediating the relationship with them (through their app and network of podcasts)?
This is like asking "why should you expect a superior business relationship?". Corporate network Stockholm syndrome.
The key issue here is that uploading an audio file to Apple Podcasts Subscriptions makes it available within the Apple Podcasts app--but nowhere else. Not Chrome nor Safari nor Firefox, not Overcast nor Google Podcasts nor any other client. So no, these things are not the same, not even close.
Every podcast ever can be listened to in any podcast client ever, with two exceptions: Spotify's on-demand audio shows that they insist on calling "podcasts," and Apple's on-demand audio shows that they call "Apple Podcast Subscriptions." They are the outliers, and deserve to be shamed for it.
Other solutions for subscriber-only and paid podcast subscriptions exist, but Spotify and Apple are doing their own proprietary things which should not then be called podcasts.
The reason is that podcasts are one of the few protocols that are still largely open and decentralized. Yes, I wouldn't expect my Tiktok videos to be available on Facebook or vice versa, and that's a bad thing because what was previously handled by open protocols was captured entirely by a handful of corporations.
Open protocols are a rare thing on the internet these days, particularly ones that work without much fuss like (podcast) RSS, and they're worth protecting.
Because a podcast is an rss feed that links to mp3s. It is an open standard where the user is in control of what client app to use. Anything that breaks this contract is no longer a podcast.
You want to monetize? Follow a structure such as relay.fm[1] where you can subscribe to an authenticated rss feed but still listen in whatever app you want. Or name it something else.
[1]: https://www.relay.fm/membership (No affiliation, just using it as an example of monetizing podcasts that still stays true to what a podcast is)
[1] - https://joeisanerd.com
I rarely get enthusiastic about apps, but it's awesome when one clearly demonstrates a team having gone 'how can we get this right'?
- listen history (with stats, so i can know what i spent the most time on and tell them/reward them accordingly)
- good history search (that doesnt keep searching podcasts im not subscribed to)
- good to-listen search (that doesnt keep searching podcasts im not subscribed to)
- would be nice: on device transcription
Only been happening for like 5+ years.
It would be much less aggravating to have an app which crashes on launch and never gives the appearance of doing anything, whatsoever.
1. listen to podcast in episode its entirety, podcasts marked it as "listened to"
2. (time passes, if it was cached at all it certainly isn't now)
3. I remember episode, would like to listen on plane/bus/train without eating mobile data. Click the "download" button.
4. download completes, little icon appears showing the file is downloaded
If you assume this means it worked, immediately close the app, you're in for a surprise. Because if you watch, the little "downloaded" icon disappears a second or so after the download finishes, I guess the app goes "oh this was listened to, I can delete the data". What I've found is you need to swipe right (??) to mark the episode as unplayed, then download it.
There's so many silly Apple usability bugs that I encounter - sorry I'm on a roll now so I'll quickly describe my favourite one. The iOS "Clock" app's Timer functionality used to fail to play the selected sound if you set a 30 second timer and didn't touch the device. What happened was the screen was also scheduled to shut off after 30 seconds, and some weirdness caused this to interfere with the sound playing (now fixed, thankfully). I discovered this I was exercising and wanted to do a plank for 30 seconds. What was probably 1 minute later I realised and felt like an idiot :)
Apple Podcasts for the Watch apparently will not download any podcast over two hours for offline playback. This limit is not documented anywhere on their website or in any forum. I'm not even sure it's two hours. I just noticed episodes under two hours downloaded, and episodes over two hours didn't.
It is a dealbreaking defect that it cannot download long podcasts. It is also user-hostile and absurd they do not document this limit or at least show an error message.
And man, Apple's Podcast app is terrible. I can't believe how buggy it is, nor can I believe how awful the UI is. It's shocking how bad it is when I compare it to other Apple apps that I love (things like Logic and FCP). Even boring apps like Pages and Numbers are really well made. But they completely dropped the ball on Podcasts and Music. It's bizarre.
Yes, because this was creating DDoS levels of traffic to podcast hosting providers. Now Apple simply pings madly away at all known podcast RSS feeds and updates clients when there is a new episode. What would be far greener -- and efficient! -- would be for them to get on board with PodPing[1] to not only deliver feed updates much faster but to use a tiny fraction of the resources they are using now to get it done.
Author here. This has never been a problem, both in terms of volume and cost. I host ~0.25% (maybe more? I haven't checked recently) of all podcasts listed on Apple and up to a few years ago, I wasn't even using a CDN. Two Heroku dynos at ~$250/mo (25 customer subscriptions today) running a Python back-end with no caching at all was able to keep up without trouble. In fact, the only reason I added a CDN was Heroku's infrastructure having spooky issues with that volume of traffic.
Podcast hosting providers larger than me running on their own hardware should have (had) exactly zero trouble.
It gets a bit complex if your hosting company supports dynamic audio/ad insertion depending on how you accomplish that, but as far as retrieving the RSS XML feed, that has no impact.
Apple reality distortion to claim this is positive for them.
Than there came Tim Cook's "upgrades": OS X was renamed to macOS, iTunes to Music, and Apple blocked LAN-related options which came with purchased devices.
At the same time Apple asked me to pay for the same functionality and their ecosystem's attractiveness started getting shittier. Since then, with similar actions, Tim Cook switched increasingly more of my activities from Apple's increasingly-hostile and toxic ecosystem to almost anywhere else.
For some reasons, which I don't recall, it was supposed to be some - not all - music from my original CDs, ripped by me under law allowing to have digital copies of owned audio CDs.
Even for a family for instance, it means they'd all have to share the same ID, which would be a royal PITA, especially if you're setting parental controls for the kids.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/19/22791968/apple-podcasts-...
This is speculation presented as news. The confusion certainly appears to be real, but there's no actual investigative reporting.
Here’s another article from an apple friendly source
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/19/podcasts-rating-prompt-...
EDIT: Actually - found a screenshot mid-podcast: https://i.imgur.com/dnqcAbQ.jpeg
The smart move by Apple is to keep podcasts open, keep being the de facto provider, don’t bother making money from it now, and use it as a foot-in-the-door as the web evolves for future plays.
They are already in the process of losing that.
> Spotify overtook Apple Podcasts as the biggest US podcast platform in 2021, when the Swedish company drew 28.3 million monthly US podcast listeners, about 200,000 more than its rival did.
— https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/spotify-apple-po...
Spotify, with it's own walled garden podcasts without RSS feeds, that can only be listened to with spotify app.
There is definitely something going on in podcasts, and it's bigger than Apple.
Maybe Apple could resist it by trying to keep podcasts open, like you suggest? Or maybe they'd just go down with the ship? Apple is clearly trying to beat Spotify at the walled garden game though, not try to figure out how to make money from openness. The walled garden game (and the analytics and ad placement you get from having more control of podcasts than just supplying RSS feeds to them) are way more profitable for the central platforms -- if not for the podcast producers, and who even cares about the podcast listeners?
Today it's mirrored across dozens of aggregators, converted to eBooks, converted to Morse Code, uploaded to YouTube, posted on social media, emailed to listeners and included in magazine articles and news broadcasts across the globe. All the content is still under my direct control.
As for making money, not so much. I'd have to check my accounts for an exact number, but $500 over that time is about right.
It highlights to me that someone is making money from podcasting, but that someone is not me and I doubt it's any different for the vast majority of podcast producers.
I think as a society we need to figure out how content creators can be remunerated for their efforts and not perpetuate the current model where "facilitators" in all their varied guises make all the money.
But, there are obvious holes here. Like what constitutes "filling that request". In the context of actual bug bounties, at the minimum the bug goes away. For something like a painting? A podcast?
I need a beautiful sunset"
- "Here's this photo of the sun setting that I took outside the safeway"
- - "nah."
- "Here's this hand crafted lovingly painted canvas I made over the course of 3 weeks"
- - "nah. (but I'll just save a copy of that thanks)"
Sadly no Overcast on Mac, anyone found a good podcast player for Mac? (paid or free)
Edit: Little things like pressing left/right arrows does nothing in the app. (just want to skip around the podcast ads). Buggy UI (as I type this, the volume slider in the app is greyed out.. but still works). Also there doesn't appear to be any timer, to stop the podcast after x minutes. (I sure it used to do this)
But this is the play several big players are involved in make to try to convert podcasts into walled gardens.
The OP is really sniping around the edges of a major thing that's going on, which Apple is actually playing catch-up on.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/will-spotify-ruin-podcast...
https://fair.org/home/the-new-podcast-oligopoly/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/23/techscape...
I am not saying this to "excuse" Apple, I'm interested in no such thing. My point is that stopping Apple wouldn't stop it.
I don't know how to stop it. It's sad.
But I don't listen to spotify podcasts, even when some of my favorites get absorbed by them.
Sounds like a lot of what Apple does!
Other podcast clients (like Overcast) started doing this long before Apple. If you want to do timely notifications for new episodes, synchronisation, waste less power on the phone doing useless polling, etc., this is a fairly obvious thing to do.
And if you’re using Apple’s Podcast app, the server-side crawling changes nothing wrt. their ability to “fuck with” podcasts. They could’ve done that client-side too.
Didn't Spotify spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get exclusive rights to podcasts (Joe Rogan comes to mind)? That isn't very innovative, and it actively reduces the choice and competition in the marketplace.
Good for Joe Rogan though (allegedly) getting $200+ million out of Spotify.
As someone who doesn't particularly like Rogan's work (no offense to anyone who does!), I guess I'm glad Spotify hastened his decline by walling him off in their private garden.
Well this is going to be a problem for podcastsaver as well.
What s scummy move by Apple, the nice thing about podcasts is that it’s a very open technology — all you needed was RSS.
Syndicate with apple but don’t host your data exclusively there.
- Their own backups of their master audio
- Separate uploads to competing services with significant market share (e.g. Spotify)
It's not really surprising that Apple DRM-locks the audio files pulled from their podcast service. They should have messaged that better, but Apple has DRM locked everything coming from their music services for a very long time.
Let he who is without a data loss event cast the first "their own backups" stone.
Given that nobody else DRMs podcast audio, this is deeply surprising.
Funnily enough, the podcast was ATP, wherein Marco Arment frequently discusses his podcast app Overcast.
Is this for a special set of podcasts that are using Apple's system to manage access to paid subscriptions? If that is the case, then this seems reasonable.
If so, I agree this is a deliberately snaky move on Apple's part.
The DRM, the fact there’s no RSS feed, the initial hosting cost - it all stems from the fact this is a service designed to host paid podcasts that subscribers can pay to access - of course it’s going to be closed off and restricted…
The header on the documentation page reads “Join the Apple Podcasters Program to start selling your subscriptions on Apple Podcasts”.
The article is poorly researched at best and likely thinly disguised marketing for the authors service, knowing most will just take them at their word without digging into the specifics of these ridiculous criticisms.
[1] https://podcasters.apple.com/support/892-apple-podcasters-pr...
Also, the Apple Podcast app shows you episodes that are subscription only, and you cannot mark them as 'played', they stay there, on top, taunting you...
Spotify is doing the same thing and has been for years. Nobody seemed to care about it then?
I'd guess the opposite, it's the mindset of a company that feels they lost dominance over the podcasting world and are trying to hold on what's left.
Can this be solved by use of, e.g. Audio Hijack? (https://rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/)
The authentication could be used to validate that you're a subscriber, and push out subscriber-only content, allowing creators to monetize in more ways while also keeping the platform open.
I’ve never used the Apple Podcast app, and only learned about the Apple only features while listening to John Carreyrou‘s podcast during the Theranos trial. They had member only episodes (paid) which were only accesible using Apple’s app, but they also had a public RSS feed which excluded those members only episodes.
Given that the people migrating the podcasts are the actual copyright owners, that should not even be illegal? (But I am not an expert.)
By looking online I see some random software for removing Apple's FairPlay, but it's all commercial.
I don't use their app (Overcast for iOS is great!), so I wasn't familiar with any of this, but most of their site seems focused on the usual podcast stuff, same as it has been for a long time. When I started digging to find the bad behavior, I eventually came across this page about subscriptions.
Is the idea that people who have an existing podcast and are tired of paying the S3 or OVH bill (or whatever) look into this "Apple Podcasts Subscriptions" service and it says right up top you can offer your podcast for free. So they click through to the pricing page[1] and see that they can sign up for $20/year and keep offering their show for free, and it isn't clear on the publicly-available pages I've linked so far that this is going to break your podcast, making it no longer freely available everywhere.
It's possible that's buried somewhere in the fine print, and given how many lawyers Apple employs, I'd be shocked if it's not. Still, this is BAD behavior, a bait-and-switch.
It's possible to offer podcasts by subscription. Even on their own list of hosting providers[2] they mention Blubrry, Libsyn, Omny, and RSS.com, all of which do that. (Most of them charge more than $20/year for hosting, too.) But critically, all of those still offer a feed so you can listen in the app of your choice. Once you take away the feed and lock it down to only your app, you're not producing a podcast anymore. You're producing an on-demand audio show, like Spotify does.
I get the appeal. Spotify and Apple both can say "using our app, you can listen to any podcast, PLUS a bunch of shows exclusive to us!" But of course, Spotify's exclusives can't be listened to in Apple Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts exclusives can't be listened to in Spotify, because they're not actually podcasts at that point.
Apple should know better. They're usually better than this. Shame on Apple.
0. https://podcasters.apple.com/878-subscriptions
1. https://podcasters.apple.com/support/904-availability-of-app...
This is just straight up egregious. They are encoding your freely distributed content with their DRM. Without offering any method of removing it. Surely there is some licencing issue there.
Watch the classic Apple "Rip, Mix, Burn" commercial.[1]
One question I had is: if you want to make money from a podcast, is it really so bad to just pick one platform like Apple Podcasts, or YouTube, or, etc.?
As a small business, isn’t having one simple to use platform pretty good?
Also, I have experienced ‘free’ access to one Premium podcast, and I never minded that I only got to listen to part of it. That was Sam Harris’s podcast, and I would be surprised if that was an Apple exclusive, so how does that work?
Off topic, but: I love the Apple Podcast service. I only subscribe to about ten podcasts, but that is enough for lots of good content, and I wear an Apple Watch and almost always have my AirPods with me, so the podcasts are always easy to get to.
The fundamental misunderstanding is that Apple is not hosting the source RSS feed or media. As someone who operates a podcast hosting service, it's bizarre to me that the author doesn't understand this.
> This customer was pasting their Apple listing URL, but the import tool was not getting a feed back.
Of course, because it's not an RSS feed URL. And again, I'm shocked that this person doesn't understand the difference.
Please Google the Apple Podcasters Program, launched in 2021. This absolutely exists and is distinct from shows that they only list in their directory. They absolutely host the source material. I signed up for it myself to test!
> Of course, because it's not an RSS feed URL. And again, I'm shocked that this person doesn't understand the difference.
Apple exposes a public API that returns the listing metadata given the podcast ID (extracted from the end of the listing URL). That contains the RSS feed URL. You can test this with a service like getrssfeed.com. Other hosts like Transistor also offer this convenience.
Perhaps you should do a little more keeping up with the podcast industry if you're one of my competitors? ;)
Technically you're right, which everyone knows is the best kind — the transcoded and DRM encrypted audio has to live somewhere.
If you want to call that "hosting" that's fine, but "podcast hosting" usually means what you presumably do — RSS feeds pointing to standards-based, unencrypted audio (and even video) files.
What Apple "hosts" is a transformed, proprietary distribution format, which enables the kinds of use cases that Apple Podcasters Program unlocks.
That makes me wonder if they aren’t keeping their own original files… that would be strange too.
Give me RSS or death.
It would be nice if you could have a single podcast RSS backend with multiple client apps, like you can with text RSS.
That said with RSS I just use NetNewsWire which does local crawling of my feeds, and it updates its state via iCloud. But I'd definitely want a web interface if I needed one to access my feeds on a work computer or something.
Cause I'm oldskool like that. If the podcast in question doesn't have a site where I can download episodes at my leisure, I send a friendly e-mail to the podcast asking them to provide downloadable MP3s so I can avoid the vendor lock-in of Apple and other companies (who also build a profile of your listening habits, because they chant they need it for 'improvements to our service').
You get good ergonomics while still keeping the process decentralized and without vendor lock-ins?
I own an iPhone but also don't use Apple's built-in functionality unless the feature supports standards-based services can self-host (CalDAV, IMAP, etc).
I pull podcasts into my forked version of tt-rss[0] and use a script to pull down the enclosures onto my local webserver. I play the episodes using Safari (which, admittedly, is a sub-optimal experience) on my iPhone. (In my dreams I'd write an HTML5 front-end to play episodes, mark them to retain after listening, keep bookmarks, etc...)
I don't see how this could possibly provide you any benefit besides some sort of glib satisfaction. You don't want to support apple but still give them money to use their devices.