> 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.

If you reupload your audio to a new hosting service, there's no way to have your listeners move to the new service. The listeners need to physically unsubscribe and resubscribe with a new feed. This is a feature of _every single podcast hosting service_ with the exception of Apple.

If I bought a bunch of apps on my Samsung phone, and then I wanted to switch to an LG phone, but I couldn't transfer my apps or data—despite the phone running the same OS—that's lock-in. If "having to start over if you want to leave" isn't lock-in, I'm not sure what is. It's an artificial limitation that Apple deliberately put in place and didn't make clear to their customers.

> I understand that the author tries to provide an "import from Apple Podcasts" service for convenience, but that's merely a convenience.

When you run a podcast with thousands or tens of thousands of episodes, each with titles, descriptions, tags, and all other sorts of metadata on top of the mp3, it's not "merely a convenience."

> Why would there be any expectation that a podcast distribution service should also serve as a private file archive? And why would podcast hosts even need to retrieve their own material?

If it's a podcast distribution service it should be distributing the rss and mp3s. That's what "podcast" means!

What a weird attitude. "Why would you ever expect [Business X] to offer [Feature Y] that you, as a potential customer, would like to see?"

edit: especially since they are an outlier in the podcast hosting space in this regard!