I'm happy to explain! From my point of view I see this as an injection of cash into the podcasting market. Personally, I don't see podcasts as being super main

I'm happy to explain! From my point of view I see this as an injection of cash into the podcasting market. Personally, I don't see podcasts as being super mainstream (not on the same level as books / music / youtube). I think funding would allow more content to be produced, and hopefully allow for more people to enjoy podcasting. This would grow the market as a whole. Spotify has most of the music streaming market (more then double Apple Music's share). I do agree that exclusives are bad, but my assumption is that Apple will make an android podcasts app if they do start charging / require service exclusivity (Like they did with apple music). As for the iMessage issue... I don't really have a good solution for that. I know lots of people use Discord / Signal / GroupMe / Wire for group chats, since its more platform agnostic.