I deliberately don't use any of Apple's services, even though I own an iPhone. The only thing I use is the App Store, and even then I'm a minimalist as to what I install. If I want to listen to podcasts, I use the VLC Player app, and grab the podcast from the Podcast's official site, and then use iTunes to transfer the .MP3 to VLC, over USB.
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').
I appreciate the sentiment of not wanting to give into vendor lock-in for convenience but why manually download podcasts and go through the whole process when you can use RSS and ask podcasters to keep supporting RSS feeds?
You get good ergonomics while still keeping the process decentralized and without vendor lock-ins?
I agree-- RSS feeds are wonderful. I just wish more podcasts kept a complete feed. I'm a "completionist" and it turns me off when I have to scrape episode archive pages to get download links for past episodes that have dropped off the RSS feed. That's the biggest barrier for me to start listening to a new podcast.
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 feel you. Even though I am more okay with the transience of the feeds.
I have a similar setup but running on my cloud VM and using my custom scripts and apps. I have built a CLI client but not gotten around to mobile apps yet. Hope to finish work on a proper self hosted server and a suite of applications for desktop and mobile for the same and open source it.
That is so much work to go through when you could just buy an android instead of an iphone!
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.
You do realize that most podcasts are MP3s that you can download, and that podcasting uses RSS to notify clients? The way you're doing it is worse than the way Stallman reads email...
Using iTunes to move files is just as much "using Apple services" as just using Apple's podcast app. All you have accomplished is making life harder for yourself.
"Under the hood, Apple stopped having each device request a copy of RSS feeds."
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.
The entirety of all the podcasts on iTunes/Apple Podcasts RSS feeds downloaded is around 200-250GB across the 2.5M+ pods. Hosting the RSS feed should be an easy task. Add in caching via ETag and server-side (host the feed as a static file, only re-render when user updates something), and your server load goes down drastically.
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.
I agree with this. We actually dynamically render RSS feeds (we have some personalization options) and while we've had to optimize it here and there, it doesn't even register as a real cost or problem (streaming MP3 files to listeners is the real cost of hosting podcasts).
I'm interested to see this podping service, however given the whole model of RSS is that the end-user is requesting feed updates (I would guess daily on average, but maybe hourly?), I have a hard time thinking this was a problem for podcast providers. I have no knowledge of the implementation at scale, but given the feed is static for the most part, wouldn't podcast hosting providers want their users constantly checking in?
Depends on the podcast and the users. If I know my favorite afternoon commute podcast drops at 4:30 PM local and I don't see it by 4:45 PM, I'm going to be doing the pull-to-refresh thing frequently, hoping it's available to download before I leave the WiFi at work for my drive home. I suppose Podping plus push notification to all app installs subscribed to the podcast that just updated would be another way to do it.
Would podcast hosting providers rather get an engineer that knows how to handle that traffic and get all the tracking and ID data of a device that they can communicate to their advertisers or have Apple make their lives easier but their service less valuable?
Apple reality distortion to claim this is positive for them.
Yeah. WebSub works great. The only listed reason is that subscriptions only last 15 days which isn't true. There is no hard limit in the protocol, it just depends on the hub and clients limits.
The best part is how Apple Podcasts had a 1.x star rating in the App Store so they gamed the system in a way that would get any other app kicked off - they prompted people for reviews making them think they were rating specific podcasts and not the app
> We weren’t able to track down a copy of the prompt ourselves to confirm when and where it appears or what it looks like — which seems important if people are getting confused […]
This is speculation presented as news. The confusion certainly appears to be real, but there's no actual investigative reporting.
It’s not speculation just because they don’t have a photo of the prompt (of which I’ve received personally) - the story is in plain sight in the ratings themselves, go have a look.
Here’s another article from an apple friendly source
It is definitely confusing when it is coming in the middle of a playing podcast. Just look at the App Store reviews - they are all for specific podcasts, not the app itself:
The fact that some people don't read before clicking isn't something I'm going to hold against Apple. The prompt isn't a block of legalese, and it doesn't claim in any way to be asking to rate the specific podcast.
My delivery tracking app has popped up the same screen asking me to rate it, but I've never figured it was asking me to rate my UPS driver.
Apples own design guide for requesting reviews, the guide for which they use to reject apps or app updates stipulates:
"Avoid interrupting people while they're performing a task or playing a game."
I would say mid podcast certainly qualifies as breaking that rule. They know exactly what they are doing when they ask for ratings mid-podcast and the reviews show it. The fact that it is confusing users would be enough for Apple to remove the app from the App Store for review manipulation if it were anyone but themselves. Again, take a look at the review section:
The screenshot you posted is the same format as review prompts for every app I've seen one on. It's literally just "Enjoying <app name>?". Sure, they could go the extra mile to disambiguate for those that aren't familiar, but this is pretty simple stuff.
Reading this, I get the impression that someone at Apple tried to do the market capture playbook tactics (churn prevention, competitor lockout, first-party-favoritism) in an open world (podcasts). Obviously it doesn’t work, while eroding the underlying ecosystem.
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.
> 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.
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?
I only use Apple Podcasts to automatically sync a couple of podcasts onto my Apple Watch. The rest of the time I use Overcast. But that Apple Watch sync feature is a compelling use case.
I primarily listen to Podcasts on my Mac, been using the default Apple one... which works, but it feels very much like a half baked copy from the iPad app.
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)
Perhaps there were special deals in place for high profile podcasts?
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.
Sure there is. For example if you want to use one client on one platform, another client on another. I want not just my subscriptions to be updated on an ongoing basis between two unrelated clients, but play position and play/unplayed to sync.
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.
I listen to hours of podcasts each day (dog-walking, walking, running etc) and am fully immersed in the Apple ecosystem, but the Apple Podcast app is a turkey. Shallow feature set, bugs that never get fixed and an environment that doesn't evolve. It's software that can only be developed by a company that hates its user base. Ugh. I've been using and loving iCatcher for years [1].
I’ve used the Apple podcasts app to pre-download content for offline listening, only to drive out to the middle of nowhere with no data service only to have the app refuse to load.
It would be much less aggravating to have an app which crashes on launch and never gives the appearance of doing anything, whatsoever.
HBO Max is the worst offender in this regard. I've downloaded entire seasons of shows only for them to refuse to play without a connection -- after I boarded an airplane.
I've had similar issues with downloading podcasts for offline listening before. One I can reliably hit is:
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 :)
Overcast really destroys everything else I've used for listening to a podcast. Simple and intuitive UI, customizable streaming/download settings, quickly add any podcast - and that's at the free level. I would never go back to Apple or even Spotify.
I rarely get enthusiastic about apps, but it's awesome when one clearly demonstrates a team having gone 'how can we get this right'?
The sheer productivity and boundless creativity of this guy is exceptional. Thanks for the mention.
One of the heroes who allowed my teenage musings to be published on Tumblr. It's so wild and fascinating to know that the same single is behind one of the top podcast player app.
Source: https://marco.org/2013/05/20/one-person-product
Can’t speak to the rest of it, but Marco has said that he’s working on something on the “listen history” front after tons of request from people asking for something à la Spotify Wrapped.
The trick is that he’s very adamantly (and correctly imo) opposed to user tracking of almost any kind, which I think complicates things here
Oh for sure, I’m not saying it’s not feasible but I think it’s not unreasonable that people would want this feature to work/sync across multiple devices, and that’s where the much higher complexity comes in since syncing that data reliably using CloudKit seems to be frustrating atm (none of this is my domain at all, just pure speculation based on what I’ve read and recall him saying on podcasts so I could be way off)
Tried all the common choices for iOS like Overcast and Castro, but settled on Pocket Casts. It’s cross platform and open source (client only) and in my opinion has the best UX. Also the only one with a reliable offline Apple Watch experience back when I tested them.
My favorite part of Apple podcasts is going to Library | Shows and then having all the show icons rearrange themselves every-time I'm about to click the one I want (as they update).
Awful app. I tried using it because you can use it with the Apple Watch to listen to podcasts without a phone. This is essential for me, because I have a wifi Watch and like to run sans phone.
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.
Thank you for pointing out this app! I've been looking for a podcasting app that isn't Apple's and doesn't require you to create an account and store stuff in the cloud. (I just want to access publicly available RSS feeds! How hard is that?)
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.
> You could sign up to allow Apple to host your show and its audio (for a cool $20/year). In exchange, you could charge a subscription fee to your listeners... If you host your show with Apple, the only listeners you can have are folks with the Apple Podcasts app... The audio will be protected with DRM.
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.
This service doesn't give podcast hosts a way to retrieve their own material. It doesn't inform them that they'll be completely locked into Apple's service. If creators were aware of this upfront, then sure, I'd say "just don't use it" too.
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 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.
> 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."
There are no podcasts with tens of thousands of episodes.
And there are very few with thousands. And if you're at that level of professionalism and popularity then you know what you're doing and this article doesn't apply.
> 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!
I'm a bit out of the loop but wouldn't hosts have the original source material that they uploaded? Similar to how users have the source images/videos to whatever they upload to TikTok and Instagram? I suspect neither offer an export either.
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.
> wouldn't hosts have the original source material that they uploaded
As far as I'm aware, Apple never resurfaces the audio after it's uploaded, even in your dashboard. Even if they did, making someone manually download and reupload every asset for potentially hundreds of episodes is sadistic. Moreover, you physically can't leave, because your listeners won't follow you to your new hosting service.
> These users aren't there just for generic hosting, but also for the network effects.
The network effects are limited to an app with only 40% of the market. Outside the US, that number is even smaller.
> just that there is fairly old precedent
Every podcast hosting service ever has allowed you to leave their service.
This is all Apple bringing their usual dirty tactics into an ecosystem that has historically been open. Everything Apple does is designed to keep you buying Apple products and services forever.
Except that "pod"casts have always been Apple's ecosystem. They've introduced a new product that is less open, but haven't actually stopped supporting the completely open options that have always existed.
What? Something historically being named after an Apple product doesn't make it Apple's ecosystem.
I've used Pocket Casts on Android for many years, and before that on iOS. I don't even know what the Apple podcast app looks like -- I carefully chose a podcast player that wouldn't lock me into its ecosystem. Podcasts have always been an open ecosystem, one that I greatly appreciate.
>Moreover, you physically can't leave, because your listeners won't follow you to your new hosting service.
This is patently not true. I've had to do this after a podcast host had an outage and our followers moved over because we posted on social that there was a new feed. Joe Rogan's followers moved to Spotify just fine after he removed all other traces of his show.
It's not great but you're literally getting what you pay for.
They don't need to. We didn't either since the server hosting the RSS feed was down. You just tell your subscribers to move on whatever platforms you're advertising on.
That wasn't possible as the host was completely down. I'm not sure if it was 100% but we had more followers on the new platform than the old one within the first month so most of them must have followed.
It's perfectly reasonable for a user to pay a big company for hosting, and then delete their local copies, since they paid for hosting. And then assume that, because their data is publicly available, that they'll be able to download that information.
Getting your photos off of Instagram is easy, according to the top 10 search results for "Instagram photo downloader". But even then, the distinction that you're not paying Instagram for hosting is notable.
Or your computer crashed and you're having to rebuild from a failed backup. Or you're traveling away from your backups and need access. Or you upload from one device and usually download to your archive on another device. There are more scenarios in heaven and earth than I could possibly list here.
That you can't think of a single scenario in which people might want to rely on the previously-uploaded copies of a large binary files is one thing. That you dismiss the several I came up with off the top of my head is another.
In addition to the audio, there's also show specific metadata like episode names, summaries, and show notes, which can get pretty comprehensive. It would maybe be a smart idea to have a copy of those outside of your hosting provider, but that's not common.
The bigger thing though is less about the data and more about your listeners. If you move to another podcast host, it's obviously important that your existing listeners move with you, and every public podcast host I'm aware of will happily redirect your feeds (as mentioned in the article)
With Apple you have to ask people to move, and asking people to take an action is necessarily going to involve a lot of churn and confusion.
> 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.
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!"
How about 'nobody can freely rip my subscriber only files' but free files are free to be ripped? Seems like a reasonable interpretation to me. Even more reasonably, I might expect that I can freely rip my files regardless of DRM.
The original file creator doesn't have an issue with DRM anyway, since he has the original file.
The whole point of DRM is to try to restrict non-creators from making copies.
(An alternative that I might find acceptable is DRM that is removed after a short amount of time, but it would require laws with heavy fines on the violator companies that would "forget" to leave it up, and also not plan for cases like bankruptcy. )
> 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…
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.
Every other podcast hosting service in existence provides RSS feeds. But unless you've already done your homework and you're starting a podcast, you don't know why not having one is important.
That's not a comparable situation. Spotify sign contracts with successful podcasters who they pay(> $100 million in one case) to produce content for their platform.
The argument here is that by offering a "Click here to start your [not really a]podcast" button, Apple is suckering in people who don't understand how Apple's iDevice-only offering differs from every other podcast hosting service.
>If you're charging a subscription fee then it makes sense that the podcast lives in a walled DRM'ed garden
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.
> In the same way it doesn't make any sense to have DRM on music or anything else I pay for
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.
In the context of podcasts where there's a regular stream of episodes, it's perfectly reasonable to say that you have DRM free access to any episode that occurred prior to your subscription ending. It's how every single other podcast subscription service works.
(full disclaimer: I run engineering for a competitive podcast subscription service, Supercast)
So you think Apple should host podcasts for free out of the goodness of their heart? Apple's a business, not a charity/non-profit.
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.
I personally don't have any trouble with them charging for hosting. I don't even have a problem with them offering paid subscriptions. I have a problem with them restricting consumption to their own Apple Podcasts app, because that makes the results not a podcast at all. Like Spotify, they're creating on-demand audio shows that require their client to listen to.
> 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.
I look at the DMA and I start to wonder if all Europe is really going to get out of this is “EU editions” of products; and not just from Apple. They’re certainly a lucrative market, probably deserving of their own SKUs.
Maybe. Note that, like most other US companies, and especially ones accused of espionage, Apple has been illegal in the EU since 2015, though enforcement of this has been understandably foot-dragging.
If you’re paying money, signing an agreement and uploading files, Apple isn’t tricking you: you’re not doing your due diligence OR you just don’t care if anyone outside the Podcasts app can listen (there are podcasters who for reasons—good or not—assume their reach is only about as far as iTunes/Apple Podcasts).
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.
I can’t agree that signing an agreement means Apple gets to behave however they want within the confines of the law. A contract should not be something that one hides behind, but something that someone holds up as enshrining a shared, common sense understanding of an agreement.
The fact that an Apple Podcasts user tried to do something that is 1) not unreasonable given other podcasting platforms and 2) not clearly understood to be contractually barred tells me that there is unacceptable deception.
Companies can write all sorts of convoluted (and legally enforceable) contracts but that is not the future we should be striving towards. Having the law on your side does not make it ethical.
If you’re a hobbyist, you might go “oh no, this won’t work out, Overcast users can’t see my podcast” and switch hosting providers.
If you’re going into podcasting as a business, don’t skimp on having a lawyer review the things you’ll be signing up and paying for, and if you skimp on that and get unlucky, expect to be doing the work required to move providers if what you signed up for isn’t satisfactory. It’s really that simple. This service costs this much and has these limitations, that service costs more but doesn’t have those limitations.
So yeah, when you sign a service agreement, expect only exactly what the service offers in the agreement, and if the terms are not satisfactory, go sign with someone else. What is the issue? If I can’t find someone’s podcast in Overcast, I’m simply never going to consider even listening to it. Conversely, some podcasters are actually okay with that and would prefer to pay for cheaper hosting. That’s a valid choice for them to make too, but they are making a choice whether they pay attention to it or not.
Also: just a note, this is only a hosting issue. You can still list your podcast in the iTunes Podcast Directory (or whatever it’s called now) without hosting on Apple’s servers.
> expect only exactly what the service offers in the agreement, and if the terms are not satisfactory, go sign with someone else.
You can't go somewhere else, because going somewhere else means starting over from scratch. That's the whole point of my post: you're locked in. The customer who reached out with this issue has hundreds of episodes and can't reasonably manually reupload them all to another service.
And that sucks for them, but it is also what the service is. It’s a cheap way to funnel people through the Podcasts app and generate more services revenue for Apple; you can’t even really call it a podcast host by any reasonable definition. Spotify’s service is about funneling people through the Spotify app to sell subscriptions and ads. YouTube’s service is basically the same. It’s a legitimate service that they signed up for that if you know what you’re getting into probably isn’t the worst deal.
Total crap though for podcast listeners, and also if you didn’t check out the service before committing to it. Sorry for your prospective customer, hopefully your post helps keep others out of this lobster trap.
On the topic of subscriptions, Spotify does have an open ecosystem where purchasing a subscription through Spotify isn't necessarily purchasing a subscription through Anchor. With Apple, the only subscription you're buying is Apple's subscriptions and other platforms are completely locked out.
If the user is having trouble migrating off Apple's hosting, they'd still have trouble migrating to a different host. Uploading hundreds of episodes and all the corresponding tagging/metadata is a pain no matter what.
> If you’re going into podcasting as a business, don’t skimp on having a lawyer review the things you’ll be signing up and paying for, and if you skimp on that and get unlucky, expect to be doing the work required to move providers if what you signed up for isn’t satisfactory. It’s really that simple.
There’s a comedic version of this in I Think You Should Leave where a party planner hires an impersonator but fails to read the fine print that says the impersonator can hit anyone he wants to.
The issue is that people who get into podcasting don’t know ahead of time that it will become a business. That’s not “skimping” on hiring a lawyer, that’s just going about life as any reasonable person does. I’m sure even Jesus himself wouldn’t have read all of the terms and conditions for every service he used.
The "is-should" gap here is irrelevant. In our ideal worlds Apple "should" not hide the data and protect the audio files with DRM. Apple argues against this position with their business interest in mind.
I disagree. To me the “is-should” gap is the only thing worth talking about. Everything else is just a matter of fact. I’m not a lawyer anyways so I don’t feel like my opinion on what the law is will be very helpful.
Apple is going to do what is best for Apple, and when that is contrary to our interests we should talk about it. Laws of Man are not laws of nature, they are a perpetually shifting body of agreements that in a democracy we have some liberty to adjust.
You don’t need to be a lawyer to have opinions on what the law should be, but if you’re going to propose a legal reform you’re going to come up against the existing values that caused the existing laws to be formed.
Contract law is about one of the oldest forms of law there is and it persists because it is fundamentally two or more parties coming to and being bound by an agreement. It is an age old tale at this point that you basically should know what you are paying for, why you’re paying for it, what you stand to gain and if you have any doubts about the terms of the service you feel unqualified to make a judgment call on, consult someone who lives and breathes this stuff.
Apple offered terms. You accept or reject them or if you can, you renegotiate but you have to have a reason for them to consider renegotiating with you, as they’re not obligated to offer a service under any other terms than the ones they stipulated. So your concerns are really a policy dispute, not a legal one: you want the service Apple offered but not under the terms Apple offered them. How is this not resolved by either you refusing to use the service or them refusing to serve you? Neither one of you is being compelled to offer or make use of a particular podcasting service; and to be fair and I’ve been clear on this point, I think it’s a fair deal between the two parties involved that is also total crap for podcast listeners, but there’s a fair gap between thinking something is total crap and thinking there is a legislative remedy informed by good values that is fair to the service provider considering they could also and would be entirely within their rights to just not offer the service at all like all the years they didn’t offer this exact service beforehand but in which other podcast hosts have continued to exist (and still exist) and offer a like service on their terms.
Yes, contract law is as old as the Garden of Eden but there can also be too much of a good thing. The reality is that each of us enter into contracts all the time that we don’t read. And even if you read it the first time, you’ll get periodic updates to terms and conditions in your inbox. If everyone had to read the terms and conditions each time, society would grind to a halt.
Given that fact, the only reasonable way forward in my view is that contracts do not hide what should be plainly known to other parties in the contract.
> Given that fact, the only reasonable way forward in my view is that contracts do not hide what should be plainly known to other parties in the contract.
Life would be nicer if everyone wrote with clarity, but given that they don’t, we have a special class of people who went through three years of house training to interpret long-ass documents written to disambiguate any possible ambiguities in advance to a standard the parties can agree to; because if you don’t spell everything out exactly, then you might lose if you have to go to court.
The contracts themselves do have to be within the bounds of what’s legal. So for example, you can’t legally sell yourself into slavery because that would come right up against the law and be an illegal contract. Similarly, NDAs don’t pass muster in California because they’re statutorily limited.
So given that you’re probably not going to get rounded up and made into a Human CentiPad for agreeing to the Apple Music TOS or give up your firstborn to use Gmail, I guess you have to prioritize don’t you? When the stakes are “I’ll lose access to this service”, you better figure out what can cause you to lose it if you value the service. A good place to start is to know what is mission critical, like a web host for your podcast if your business is podcasting and an invoice tracker if you do a lot of billing.
So if you’re doing business and you didn’t review the service agreement ahead of time, that is on you. I work in a small business right now with a very small number of people: we review our service agreements ahead of time before we sign them, and even after we’ve reviewed them we have a lawyer on retainer we run them by even if we’re just changing vendors or adding a new vendor because sometimes vendors try to slip things in. That’s what it’s like to do business. There’s a lot of paperwork too, even if the paperwork is virtual and if you take shortcuts, it might work out for you, but you’re exposing yourself to issues down the road if you don’t do your due diligence.
Life’s tough in the aluminum siding business. I don’t know what else to tell you.
Laws supposedly punish anti competitive practices, yet somehow Apple still hasn't been shut down for owning both an OS and an app store (and with their own apps in there too !) on very personal computers...
> you’re not doing your due diligence OR you just don’t care if anyone outside the Podcasts app can listen
If you don't know to ask, how would you make an informed choice?
> the biggest podcast ecosystem that exists
That's kind of the thing: people think "I'm going to do it right and host with Apple, they're the OG podcast company" and then find themselves trapped.
YouTube is very different in that its videos are not DRM protected, but the alternatives are (today at least) much worse in terms of content diversity.
Apple announced they would allow passthrough hosting for premium feeds a few weeks ago. Right now it's only open to handful of big hosting partners, but will probably open up more in the near future. This was likely more about laziness and/or rushing to market that it was a genuine ploy. Apple is still the bulk of our listening (60ish%) and we still get all the first-party download metrics from our hosting service. Premium feeds are rehosted by Apple and it's huge PITA because we have ad-supported public feeds and ad-free premium feeds and need to build them twice. That will hopefully be fixed soon.
> If I upload a podcast to Apple, it's physically inaccessible unless you have a Mac or an iOS device.
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.
> requires downloading podcasts in itunes on your desktop, and then manually transferring them to your Android phone after finding the locally stored files.
TFA says they're DRMed, are they still readable on a random android client just by moving the files ?
That part of TFA confused me as well, because I just tested it out on my Win10 desktop, and it worked effortlessly.
I didn't even have to search for the local files. iTunes had a nice "Show in Windows Explorer" button next to the episode I downloaded, which opened a directory with the mp3 audio file for the episode (neatly tagged and named and all). I opened it with VLC and confirmed that the playback works perfectly fine.
Disclaimer: I haven't tested the part with transferring the file to an Android device specifically. But if an mp3 audio file plays fine in any third-party media player on Windows, I think it is safe to assume that it would play fine on Android as well.
For sure, it's nice to know there's an out for people willing to work it out.
TBF, I'd assume the author knows there would be workarounds, like de-DRM the iTunes files. Or go full analog loophole style and rerecord the podcast audio etc.
The point was probably how shitty of an experience it stayed for people outside the Apple bubble (podcasts are really about convenience. I only started seriously listening to them once I got an iPhone, because of the sheer inconvenience of having to plug and drag files from my desktop for every new episode)
> The point was probably how shitty of an experience it stayed for people outside the Apple bubble
Could be, but they made it sound like those workarounds are required everywhere outside of Apple devices (which would include Windows as well). Which is painting a pretty different picture from what the reality is, as none of the workarounds are required on Windows, it is click and play just like on any Apple device.
If I understand the comment chain correctly, they first tried a random "not hosted by Apple" podcast and could get the MP3, as expected. They were then directed to a "hosted by Apple" podcast and could not get an MP3. So the workaround does not work.
Do you happen to have another example? This one doesn't work for me, but for an entirely different reason - it says that this specific podcast isn't available in the US store at the moment. So I cannot even access the episode on any device at all.
I am curious about how this works. Did you have to set some specific toggle to make it available on Apple Podcasts for Apple devices only? Or is this the standard flow for making a podcast available on Podcasts app? How do the other podcasts on the frontpage that are available for downloading on other devices do it?
Tangentially related, I wonder why it says "Apple Podcasts Preview" at the top of the page. Could it be that the app is just in the preview stage and just started the rollout with Apple devices first, with the support for other devices coming later through a web version (i.e., similar to how it was with Apple Music on the initial launch)?
When you click the option to add a podcast to Apple Podcasts in the Podcasts Connect portal, there's one option to use an RSS feed and one to host your show on Apple.
I believe "Apple Podcasts Preview" just means you're looking at the web view.
You cannot download these podcast episodes as a file because they are protected with DRM. Seriously, find one of these shows and try getting a file from it
Are all podcasts protected this way or just some specific ones? Because I picked a random one from the front page of the podcast section in iTunes on Win10, and it worked for me with zero issues[0].
If you can find a podcast on Apple Podcasts for which the method I described in my other comment doesn't work, please post it here. Because it would feel kinda strange if Podcasts app applied DRM like this only to some specific podcasts and not all of them.
No: this isn't just any random podcast from the iTunes homepage. It only applies to podcasts which are hosted by Apple, not ones which Apple lists in its directory. This is a very small percentage of shows.
It shows on iTunes for PC just fine. I have confirmed in another reply in this thread that I was able to see the DRMd podcast episode posted by @bastawhiz on PC, but I was not able to download it.
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.
> why would you expect Apple to make it available to competing podcast apps?
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.
> 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.
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.
>why would you expect Apple to make it available to competing podcast apps?
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)
If someone posts something to TikTok, it's available within the TikTok app--but also via Chrome or Safari or Firefox, because every TikTok is available via an HTTPS URL. So yes, it can certainly be linked to on Facebook or anywhere else.
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.
I remember having an iMac with 3TB hard disk on which I stored all my CDs ripped in an lossless format. iTunes had an option to stream the library to local network and since this iMac was on 24/7, this was a perfect solution for me to have an audio-NAS and also kind-of remote streaming when I was connecting via VPN to my home network.
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.
Apple seem to believe what you’re talking about is supported via Home Sharing [1]. I have attempted to get this to work with a little success but I wonder if it was too little too late for you?
Too late. I have called Apple's support when they did this and they told me that there was no way to still use such functionality without paying for online Apple Music. They would serve me copies of some of my previously LAN-shared music from the internet.
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.
Home Sharing covers some of it, but the limitations of requiring everything physically on the same network and logged into the same Apple ID sound way more stringent.
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.
You can have multiple people in your family share different things from their devices. When I go to home sharing in the TV.app, I see both my computer and my spouse's.
I think what you experienced is a shift in philosophy at Apple and rot by low maintenance. In the early 2000s Apple's approach seemed to be having your computer be "the hub" and things could sync or stream from your computer (like your iPod requiring a computer). That seemed to cause problems when you had multiple computers, take your devices away from home, requiring your computer to be on and connected, requiring you to own a computer to use devices, etc. They seemed to abandon that for awhile and later shift to the cloud being the hub...along with ongoing subscriptions.
When I was in college, there were always some people on the network who would leave their iTunes wide open, and that was how I discovered new music to listen to.
I've noticed Apple is destroying their brand equity in so many ways just to squeeze out as much from their customers as possible. Having advertisements in my iPhone settings just shows how petty they are willing to be. I used to use their TV app but now it's first purpose is an advertisement for Apple TV+.
I was recently on a long drive and, if I had started listening to a podcast, then listened to something else, then tried to resume the podcast, it wouldn’t play. I tried multiple episodes, marking it as played, restarting the app, and restarting the phone and still couldn’t resume.
Funnily enough, the podcast was ATP, wherein Marco Arment frequently discusses his podcast app Overcast.
I think some of these issues stem from the paid subscriptions part (especially the lack of an RSS feed). I'm not very familiar with RSS, but is there a solution for authenticated RSS yet?
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.
There are specs. Notably the folks at RadioPublic put one out a few years ago that would standardize the process, but it never panned out. At Pinecast you get a unique feed URL that's tied to a paid subscription, but that's a bit hard to use, unfortunately.
The single reason my podcast Merged is not on Apple yet is because it’s too damn hard to register to Apple Podcasts. Apple missed out on podcasts and left Spotify to make the big numbers and money.
> Apple is letting people pay $20/year for the privilege of being locked into an ecosystem run by people who think that they’re the best thing since the transistor radio. They make it virtually impossible to leave, even when they offer no meaningful value-add to folks who have outgrown their meager offering.
Without understanding DRM that well, I’m wondering if there are analog workarounds. You can’t encrypt a sound wave between the speaker and the eardrum.
You can absolutely record the sound in realtime, but you're also losing fidelity in that recording. It's obviously not as bad as not having the audio at all, but if you're trying to capture it to upload to another provider then the experience your 2nd-provider audience gets is not as good as the 1st(Apple)-provider.
>if you host your show with Apple, the only listeners you can have are folks with the Apple Podcasts app. This feels like an absolutely wild choice from a product perspective; it’s the mindset of a company who still thinks that they have dominance over the podcasting world.
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.
This is bad behavior, antithetical to the spirit of podcasting. Offering DRM for paid subscriptions, or as an option, is one thing, but requiring it whether the podcast host wishes it or not is not defensible.
It seems bizarre to me that any serious podcast would fail to retain:
- 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.
Without having used their service, does Spotfiy not DRM their podcast audio? It seems weird that they'd have a separate code path to fetch a non-DRM'd file from their server when most (all?) of the music they serve is already DRM'd.
Even if you did retain the audio files, you still can't move your listeners to a new hosting service. You're forced to start over. Making you manually reupload your audio just adds insult to injury.
326 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadCause 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...)
[0] https://tt-rss.org/
I have a similar setup but running on my cloud VM and using my custom scripts and apps. I have built a CLI client but not gotten around to mobile apps yet. Hope to finish work on a proper self hosted server and a suite of applications for desktop and mobile for the same and open source it.
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.
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.
[1] https://podcasting20.substack.com/p/podping
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.
Such refreshs would be using If-Modified-Since, so shouldn’t cause substantial traffic.
Apple reality distortion to claim this is positive for them.
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
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/ratings-and-reviews/
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apple-podcasts/id525463029?see...
My delivery tracking app has popped up the same screen asking me to rate it, but I've never figured it was asking me to rate my UPS driver.
"Avoid interrupting people while they're performing a task or playing a game."
I would say mid podcast certainly qualifies as breaking that rule. They know exactly what they are doing when they ask for ratings mid-podcast and the reviews show it. The fact that it is confusing users would be enough for Apple to remove the app from the App Store for review manipulation if it were anyone but themselves. Again, take a look at the review section:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apple-podcasts/id525463029?see...
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?
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)
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.
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.
[1] - https://joeisanerd.com
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 :)
I rarely get enthusiastic about apps, but it's awesome when one clearly demonstrates a team having gone 'how can we get this right'?
marco.org
One of the heroes who allowed my teenage musings to be published on Tumblr. It's so wild and fascinating to know that the same single is behind one of the top podcast player app. Source: https://marco.org/2013/05/20/one-person-product
- 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
The trick is that he’s very adamantly (and correctly imo) opposed to user tracking of almost any kind, which I think complicates things here
Only been happening for like 5+ years.
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.
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 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.
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.
That's incorrect.
https://podcasters.apple.com/support/3965-how-to-change-host...
edit: especially since they are an outlier in the podcast hosting space in this regard!
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."
And there are very few with thousands. And if you're at that level of professionalism and popularity then you know what you're doing and this article doesn't apply.
If it's a podcast distribution service it should be distributing the rss and mp3s. That's what "podcast" means!
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.
> wouldn't hosts have the original source material that they uploaded
As far as I'm aware, Apple never resurfaces the audio after it's uploaded, even in your dashboard. Even if they did, making someone manually download and reupload every asset for potentially hundreds of episodes is sadistic. Moreover, you physically can't leave, because your listeners won't follow you to your new hosting service.
> These users aren't there just for generic hosting, but also for the network effects.
The network effects are limited to an app with only 40% of the market. Outside the US, that number is even smaller.
> just that there is fairly old precedent
Every podcast hosting service ever has allowed you to leave their service.
I've used Pocket Casts on Android for many years, and before that on iOS. I don't even know what the Apple podcast app looks like -- I carefully chose a podcast player that wouldn't lock me into its ecosystem. Podcasts have always been an open ecosystem, one that I greatly appreciate.
This is patently not true. I've had to do this after a podcast host had an outage and our followers moved over because we posted on social that there was a new feed. Joe Rogan's followers moved to Spotify just fine after he removed all other traces of his show.
It's not great but you're literally getting what you pay for.
Every podcast host I'm aware of would be happy to do that for you.
Getting your photos off of Instagram is easy, according to the top 10 search results for "Instagram photo downloader". But even then, the distinction that you're not paying Instagram for hosting is notable.
I don’t understand this practice. Why would you delete your own local content you probably took time to create and care about….?
This strikes me as just a novice computer user type thing.
If they do I think it is just another misunderstanding on the author’s part.
The bigger thing though is less about the data and more about your listeners. If you move to another podcast host, it's obviously important that your existing listeners move with you, and every public podcast host I'm aware of will happily redirect your feeds (as mentioned in the article)
With Apple you have to ask people to move, and asking people to take an action is necessarily going to involve a lot of churn and confusion.
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!"
I confused what possible definition of 'Digital Rights Management' could entail 'anyone can freely rip your files.'
The whole point of DRM is to try to restrict non-creators from making copies.
(An alternative that I might find acceptable is DRM that is removed after a short amount of time, but it would require laws with heavy fines on the violator companies that would "forget" to leave it up, and also not plan for cases like bankruptcy. )
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.
The argument here is that by offering a "Click here to start your [not really a]podcast" button, Apple is suckering in people who don't understand how Apple's iDevice-only offering differs from every other podcast hosting service.
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.
(full disclaimer: I run engineering for a competitive podcast subscription service, Supercast)
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.
Is there any actual value in this? I was under the impression anyone could add any external podcast to iTunes for free.
> 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.
I'm curious if this sort of arrangement will remain in place in Europe once the DMA interoperability requirements come into effect.
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.
The fact that an Apple Podcasts user tried to do something that is 1) not unreasonable given other podcasting platforms and 2) not clearly understood to be contractually barred tells me that there is unacceptable deception.
Companies can write all sorts of convoluted (and legally enforceable) contracts but that is not the future we should be striving towards. Having the law on your side does not make it ethical.
If you’re going into podcasting as a business, don’t skimp on having a lawyer review the things you’ll be signing up and paying for, and if you skimp on that and get unlucky, expect to be doing the work required to move providers if what you signed up for isn’t satisfactory. It’s really that simple. This service costs this much and has these limitations, that service costs more but doesn’t have those limitations.
So yeah, when you sign a service agreement, expect only exactly what the service offers in the agreement, and if the terms are not satisfactory, go sign with someone else. What is the issue? If I can’t find someone’s podcast in Overcast, I’m simply never going to consider even listening to it. Conversely, some podcasters are actually okay with that and would prefer to pay for cheaper hosting. That’s a valid choice for them to make too, but they are making a choice whether they pay attention to it or not.
Also: just a note, this is only a hosting issue. You can still list your podcast in the iTunes Podcast Directory (or whatever it’s called now) without hosting on Apple’s servers.
You can't go somewhere else, because going somewhere else means starting over from scratch. That's the whole point of my post: you're locked in. The customer who reached out with this issue has hundreds of episodes and can't reasonably manually reupload them all to another service.
Total crap though for podcast listeners, and also if you didn’t check out the service before committing to it. Sorry for your prospective customer, hopefully your post helps keep others out of this lobster trap.
> 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
C’est la vie. I would give Spotify kudos but their own podcast foray is what caused me to quit them.
There’s a comedic version of this in I Think You Should Leave where a party planner hires an impersonator but fails to read the fine print that says the impersonator can hit anyone he wants to.
The issue is that people who get into podcasting don’t know ahead of time that it will become a business. That’s not “skimping” on hiring a lawyer, that’s just going about life as any reasonable person does. I’m sure even Jesus himself wouldn’t have read all of the terms and conditions for every service he used.
Apple is going to do what is best for Apple, and when that is contrary to our interests we should talk about it. Laws of Man are not laws of nature, they are a perpetually shifting body of agreements that in a democracy we have some liberty to adjust.
Contract law is about one of the oldest forms of law there is and it persists because it is fundamentally two or more parties coming to and being bound by an agreement. It is an age old tale at this point that you basically should know what you are paying for, why you’re paying for it, what you stand to gain and if you have any doubts about the terms of the service you feel unqualified to make a judgment call on, consult someone who lives and breathes this stuff.
Apple offered terms. You accept or reject them or if you can, you renegotiate but you have to have a reason for them to consider renegotiating with you, as they’re not obligated to offer a service under any other terms than the ones they stipulated. So your concerns are really a policy dispute, not a legal one: you want the service Apple offered but not under the terms Apple offered them. How is this not resolved by either you refusing to use the service or them refusing to serve you? Neither one of you is being compelled to offer or make use of a particular podcasting service; and to be fair and I’ve been clear on this point, I think it’s a fair deal between the two parties involved that is also total crap for podcast listeners, but there’s a fair gap between thinking something is total crap and thinking there is a legislative remedy informed by good values that is fair to the service provider considering they could also and would be entirely within their rights to just not offer the service at all like all the years they didn’t offer this exact service beforehand but in which other podcast hosts have continued to exist (and still exist) and offer a like service on their terms.
Why should any of that be any different?
Given that fact, the only reasonable way forward in my view is that contracts do not hide what should be plainly known to other parties in the contract.
Life would be nicer if everyone wrote with clarity, but given that they don’t, we have a special class of people who went through three years of house training to interpret long-ass documents written to disambiguate any possible ambiguities in advance to a standard the parties can agree to; because if you don’t spell everything out exactly, then you might lose if you have to go to court.
The contracts themselves do have to be within the bounds of what’s legal. So for example, you can’t legally sell yourself into slavery because that would come right up against the law and be an illegal contract. Similarly, NDAs don’t pass muster in California because they’re statutorily limited.
So given that you’re probably not going to get rounded up and made into a Human CentiPad for agreeing to the Apple Music TOS or give up your firstborn to use Gmail, I guess you have to prioritize don’t you? When the stakes are “I’ll lose access to this service”, you better figure out what can cause you to lose it if you value the service. A good place to start is to know what is mission critical, like a web host for your podcast if your business is podcasting and an invoice tracker if you do a lot of billing.
So if you’re doing business and you didn’t review the service agreement ahead of time, that is on you. I work in a small business right now with a very small number of people: we review our service agreements ahead of time before we sign them, and even after we’ve reviewed them we have a lawyer on retainer we run them by even if we’re just changing vendors or adding a new vendor because sometimes vendors try to slip things in. That’s what it’s like to do business. There’s a lot of paperwork too, even if the paperwork is virtual and if you take shortcuts, it might work out for you, but you’re exposing yourself to issues down the road if you don’t do your due diligence.
Life’s tough in the aluminum siding business. I don’t know what else to tell you.
Remember how Microsoft had been punished for only having Internet Explorer pre-installed on Windows ?
If you don't know to ask, how would you make an informed choice?
> the biggest podcast ecosystem that exists
That's kind of the thing: people think "I'm going to do it right and host with Apple, they're the OG podcast company" and then find themselves trapped.
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.
Here's an example: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/test-podcast/id1667708...
TFA says they're DRMed, are they still readable on a random android client just by moving the files ?
I didn't even have to search for the local files. iTunes had a nice "Show in Windows Explorer" button next to the episode I downloaded, which opened a directory with the mp3 audio file for the episode (neatly tagged and named and all). I opened it with VLC and confirmed that the playback works perfectly fine.
Disclaimer: I haven't tested the part with transferring the file to an Android device specifically. But if an mp3 audio file plays fine in any third-party media player on Windows, I think it is safe to assume that it would play fine on Android as well.
TBF, I'd assume the author knows there would be workarounds, like de-DRM the iTunes files. Or go full analog loophole style and rerecord the podcast audio etc.
The point was probably how shitty of an experience it stayed for people outside the Apple bubble (podcasts are really about convenience. I only started seriously listening to them once I got an iPhone, because of the sheer inconvenience of having to plug and drag files from my desktop for every new episode)
Could be, but they made it sound like those workarounds are required everywhere outside of Apple devices (which would include Windows as well). Which is painting a pretty different picture from what the reality is, as none of the workarounds are required on Windows, it is click and play just like on any Apple device.
I am curious about how this works. Did you have to set some specific toggle to make it available on Apple Podcasts for Apple devices only? Or is this the standard flow for making a podcast available on Podcasts app? How do the other podcasts on the frontpage that are available for downloading on other devices do it?
Tangentially related, I wonder why it says "Apple Podcasts Preview" at the top of the page. Could it be that the app is just in the preview stage and just started the rollout with Apple devices first, with the support for other devices coming later through a web version (i.e., similar to how it was with Apple Music on the initial launch)?
I believe "Apple Podcasts Preview" just means you're looking at the web view.
If you can find a podcast on Apple Podcasts for which the method I described in my other comment doesn't work, please post it here. Because it would feel kinda strange if Podcasts app applied DRM like this only to some specific podcasts and not all of them.
0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34524966
Here is an example. Curious if you can get it to work on Windows, because I physically cannot save the audio to a normal file on Mac. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/test-podcast/id1667708...
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.
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 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)
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.
Give me RSS or death.
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.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202190
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.
Funnily enough, the podcast was ATP, wherein Marco Arment frequently discusses his podcast app Overcast.
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.
Sounds like a lot of what Apple does!
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.
- 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.
Watch the classic Apple "Rip, Mix, Burn" commercial.[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBPp-h3uNs8