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.