25 ms·

The audacity of Apple Podcasts

401 points by jeremiahlee 4y ago

kerpotgh 4y ago
[dead]
vmoore 4y ago
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').
- harshitaneja 4y ago
  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?
  - EvanAnderson 4y ago
    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...) [0] https://tt-rss.org/ https://tt-rss.org/
    - harshitaneja 4y ago
      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.
- nofreelunch 4y ago
  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.
- greedo 4y ago
  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...
- _Algernon_ 4y ago
  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.
jjcon 4y ago
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 https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/19/22791968/apple-podcasts-star-score-review-prompt https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/19/22791968/apple-podcasts-...
- chrisoverzero 4y ago
  > 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.
  - jjcon 4y ago
    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 https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/19/podcasts-rating-prompt-app-store-reviews/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/19/podcasts-rating-prompt-... EDIT: Actually - found a screenshot mid-podcast: https://i.imgur.com/dnqcAbQ.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/dnqcAbQ.jpeg
    - jrmg 4y ago
      This is just the standard alert from the SKStoreReviewController API that any app can use. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/ratings-and-reviews/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/ratings-and-reviews/
      - jjcon 4y ago
        Right but explicitly calling it during a playing podcast is obviously confusing - just look at the review section: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apple-podcasts/id525463029 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apple-podcasts/id525463029
mikece 4y ago
"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. [1] https://podcasting20.substack.com/p/podping https://podcasting20.substack.com/p/podping
- bastawhiz 4y ago
  > creating DDoS levels of traffic 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.
  - georgel 4y ago
    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.
    - bastawhiz 4y ago
      Audio insertion is actually straightforward: the audio URLs from the feed can redirect!
  - 4y ago
arthurofbabylon 4y ago
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.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  > keep being the de facto provider, 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-podcasts-controversy 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?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
cosmotic 4y ago
I stopped using Apple Podcasts because 1) they killed connectivity to my iPod; 2) the app is extremely buggy; and 3) the app is totally unusable.
- browningstreet 4y ago
  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.
  - wingworks 4y ago
    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)
    - ezfe 4y ago
      There is Overcast on Mac for Apple silicon devices
      - wingworks 4y ago
        There is? wow. (though I'm still rock'n an Intel Mac)
        hrrsn 4y ago
        It's the iPad app but it works well enough on macOS
        danaris 4y ago
Orlan 4y ago
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.
jxdxbx 4y ago
Apple Podcasts does not have a silence-trimming feature, which is reason enough to not use it. It would be nice if you could have a single podcast RSS backend with multiple client apps, like you can with text RSS.
- joeconway 4y ago
  Almost every podcast client has OPML export there is no need for a single backend to host that. Such a service would like end up awful, like Feedly
  - jxdxbx 4y ago
    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.
paulette449 4y ago
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]. [1] - https://joeisanerd.com https://joeisanerd.com
- arwhatever 4y ago
  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.
  - willhslade 4y ago
    Broken is better than unreliable.
  - laweijfmvo 4y ago
    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.
  - smcl 4y ago
    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 :)
crazygringo 4y ago
> 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.
- dabernathy89 4y ago
  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.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    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.
    - bastawhiz 4y ago
      > 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.
howinteresting 4y ago
Wait -- there are podcasts you just can't listen to if you don't have an Apple device? That's beyond absurd.
- theshrike79 4y ago
  There are also podcasts you can only listen to on Spotify. Also absurd.
  - oezi 4y ago
    Enough podcasts to listen to that aren't on any of these platforms. Give me RSS or death.
  - froglets 4y ago
    There’s also a growing number of podcasts you can only listen to if you subscribe to Amazon Music.
  - vanilla_nut 4y ago
    If it's not primarily available on RSS, it's a not a podcast IMO. I prefer to call Spotify exclusives "Spodcasts."
- pwinnski 4y ago
  Technically you can listen to them using iTunes for Windows, but it's still absurd. It's a closed system, which podcasting should not be.
voytec 4y ago
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.
- tokamak-teapot 4y ago
  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? [1] https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202190 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202190
  - voytec 4y ago
    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.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    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.
    - 4y ago
lancesells 4y ago
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+.
friend_and_foe 4y ago
I don't know why anyone is surprised. Apple's entire business model is trapping unwitting potential customers.
wwalexander 4y ago
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.
miguelazo 4y ago
More great fodder for the antitrust trials.
karavelov 4y ago
Would GDPR request under Article 15 work to get your data out?
jackson1442 4y ago
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.
- bastawhiz 4y ago
  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.
iddan 4y ago
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.
- TheRealNGenius 4y ago
  [dead]
jobs_throwaway 4y ago
> 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. Sounds like a lot of what Apple does!
janalsncm 4y ago
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.
- sircastor 4y ago
  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.
praisewhitey 4y ago
>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.
pwinnski 4y ago
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.
julienb_sea 4y ago
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.
- brunoTbear 4y ago
  I think the author's point would be that Apple is doing this to non-serious or not-serious-yet podcasters. 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.
  - ascagnel_ 4y ago
    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.
- bastawhiz 4y ago
  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.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
Would love to see the whiteboards at Apple showing all the flow chart strategies to trap people with DRM.
Animats 4y ago
Ah, Apple. Watch the classic Apple "Rip, Mix, Burn" commercial.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBPp-h3uNs8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBPp-h3uNs8
freetime2 4y ago
> 40% is nothing to shake a stick at. If you entered the podcasting space (like Spotify did) and captured 40% of users, you’d have an amazing product. Didn't Spotify spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get exclusive rights to podcasts (Joe Rogan comes to mind)? That isn't very innovative, and it actively reduces the choice and competition in the marketplace. Good for Joe Rogan though (allegedly) getting $200+ million out of Spotify.
- vanilla_nut 4y ago
  Good for Joe. Bad for Spotify users. I would personally much rather they invested in fixing bugs and UI problems with $200 million... than acquiring one (highly controversial, increasingly irrelevant) podcast. As someone who doesn't particularly like Rogan's work (no offense to anyone who does!), I guess I'm glad Spotify hastened his decline by walling him off in their private garden.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
CharlesW 4y ago
> Here’s what’s fucked: once you’ve started using Apple for hosting, you’re stuck. The fundamental misunderstanding is that Apple is not hosting the source RSS feed or media. As someone who operates a podcast hosting service, it's bizarre to me that the author doesn't understand this. > This customer was pasting their Apple listing URL, but the import tool was not getting a feed back. Of course, because it's not an RSS feed URL. And again, I'm shocked that this person doesn't understand the difference.
- duxup 4y ago
  They also describe not being able to download the content they uploaded. That makes me wonder if they aren’t keeping their own original files… that would be strange too.
- bastawhiz 4y ago
  > The fundamental misunderstanding is that Apple is not hosting the source RSS feed or media. As someone who operates a podcast hosting service, it's bizarre to me that the author doesn't understand this. Please Google the Apple Podcasters Program, launched in 2021. This absolutely exists and is distinct from shows that they only list in their directory. They absolutely host the source material. I signed up for it myself to test! > Of course, because it's not an RSS feed URL. And again, I'm shocked that this person doesn't understand the difference. Apple exposes a public API that returns the listing metadata given the podcast ID (extracted from the end of the listing URL). That contains the RSS feed URL. You can test this with a service like getrssfeed.com. Other hosts like Transistor also offer this convenience. Perhaps you should do a little more keeping up with the podcast industry if you're one of my competitors? ;)
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    > They absolutely host the source material. I signed up for it myself to test! Technically you're right, which everyone knows is the best kind — the transcoded and DRM encrypted audio has to live somewhere. If you want to call that "hosting" that's fine, but "podcast hosting" usually means what you presumably do — RSS feeds pointing to standards-based, unencrypted audio (and even video) files. What Apple "hosts" is a transformed, proprietary distribution format, which enables the kinds of use cases that Apple Podcasters Program unlocks.
tomxor 4y ago
> That’s right: 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. It’s ludicrous to assume that it’s a good thing for listeners to have to have specific hardware in order to listen to a podcast. I'm gona keep shouting this from the rooftops and maybe it will eventually sink in for some people: Apple's end game is vertical integration, it's "lock-in" on steroids. When they own every product or service in the stack, they can tune one product (like podcasts) to serve the purposes of another, even when it appears to hurt a product and it's users individually, because it benefits Apple as a whole. I get that Apple stuff is generally a nice experience and there is genuinely lots of cool technology, but people need to understand the future they are buying into with Apple. The deeper someone gets, the more painful it's going to be when that table flip moment comes, because that table has the weight of the whole Apple ecosystem holding it down - and so people will unconsciously endure much pain before doing so (lest they lose access to their podcasts); If that table flip moment comes with a competitor for an _individual_ service like this one, it's going to be a tiny inconvenience, and so users will endure less, and the product owner has more market pressure to provide a good service as the friction to change is low. Those passionate about Apple will argue with individual counter examples, but the core issue is the broader strategy that does not have user interests at heart. It's honestly heartbreaking as someone who grew up with and loved Apple computers, they hung onto the concept of holism from the 80s in making the whole computer and it has produced some excellent machines. But now the same strategy is being twisted into something that actively works against the user instead.
- sneak 4y ago
  To wit: you can't use the new hardware 2FA passkeys on iOS unless you opt in to iCloud and all of the surveillance that entails.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    Why is that surprising since the keys are specifically for logging into iCloud? Do you complaine your gasoline car doesn’t have a diesel tank?
Tagbert 4y ago
How does this relate to the thousands of podcasts that are listed in the iTunes podcast directory and that are freely playable on any podcast app on any platform? Is this for a special set of podcasts that are using Apple's system to manage access to paid subscriptions? If that is the case, then this seems reasonable.
- bastawhiz 4y ago
  This is unrelated to the vast majority of shows that just use Apple as a directory
  - Tagbert 4y ago
    Thank you
mark_l_watson 4y ago
I was interested to read the article and comments here because I am a very happy user of Apple Podcasts, but had not thought about the service from a content creator standpoint. One question I had is: if you want to make money from a podcast, is it really so bad to just pick one platform like Apple Podcasts, or YouTube, or, etc.? As a small business, isn’t having one simple to use platform pretty good? Also, I have experienced ‘free’ access to one Premium podcast, and I never minded that I only got to listen to part of it. That was Sam Harris’s podcast, and I would be surprised if that was an Apple exclusive, so how does that work? Off topic, but: I love the Apple Podcast service. I only subscribe to about ten podcasts, but that is enough for lots of good content, and I wear an Apple Watch and almost always have my AirPods with me, so the podcasts are always easy to get to.
- bastawhiz 4y ago
  Author here. I run pinecast.com, which offers paid subscriptions for Podcasters as one of the features. You can do what Apple does without looking yourself to one platform. Pinecast is hardly the only service that offers this, as well.
vk6flab 4y ago
I have produced a weekly podcast about amateur radio since 2011. It was hosted on S3 since I started because it became immediately clear that any other option would put my content under the control of someone who did not have my best interest at heart. Today it's mirrored across dozens of aggregators, converted to eBooks, converted to Morse Code, uploaded to YouTube, posted on social media, emailed to listeners and included in magazine articles and news broadcasts across the globe. All the content is still under my direct control. As for making money, not so much. I'd have to check my accounts for an exact number, but $500 over that time is about right. It highlights to me that someone is making money from podcasting, but that someone is not me and I doubt it's any different for the vast majority of podcast producers. I think as a society we need to figure out how content creators can be remunerated for their efforts and not perpetuate the current model where "facilitators" in all their varied guises make all the money.
- oehpr 4y ago
  I've thought a lot about this, and I still scratch my head over what might work. The system I think kinda fits is bug bounties. Someone registers a problem, a need, and submits a reward for filling it. Others who have that problem can add to the pot, and eventually someone can claim the pot by filling the request, with the fruits of that labor available to all. But, there are obvious holes here. Like what constitutes "filling that request". In the context of actual bug bounties, at the minimum the bug goes away. For something like a painting? A podcast? I need a beautiful sunset" - "Here's this photo of the sun setting that I took outside the safeway" - - "nah." - "Here's this hand crafted lovingly painted canvas I made over the course of 3 weeks" - - "nah. (but I'll just save a copy of that thanks)" Honestly I don't know! I want endeavors like yours to be fairly compensated for the value it adds to society, but the core of our society and how we transact is rooted in scarcity. Data isn't scarce. Novelty is. Attention is. But not data.
hardwaresofton 4y ago
I’m surprised there hasn’t been more public outcry by hosters about this. This is a huge affront to how the podcast ecosystem works. Well this is going to be a problem for podcastsaver as well. What s scummy move by Apple, the nice thing about podcasts is that it’s a very open technology — all you needed was RSS. Syndicate with apple but don’t host your data exclusively there.
WirelessGigabit 4y ago
Weird, I've extracted Podcasts from my iPhone's backup, which I can play on any device. Also, the Apple Podcast app shows you episodes that are subscription only, and you cannot mark them as 'played', they stay there, on top, taunting you...
jrochkind1 4y ago
Spotify podcasts don't have RSS feeds either. And have massively expanded their podcast program over the past few years, such that they know serve more podcast listeners than Apple. But this is the play several big players are involved in make to try to convert podcasts into walled gardens. The OP is really sniping around the edges of a major thing that's going on, which Apple is actually playing catch-up on. https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/will-spotify-ruin-podcasting https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/will-spotify-ruin-podcast... https://fair.org/home/the-new-podcast-oligopoly/ https://fair.org/home/the-new-podcast-oligopoly/ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/23/techscape-spotify-podcasts-joe-rogan https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/23/techscape...
- Trumpi 4y ago
  Well, the old-timers (such as me) don't really like what Spotify are doing either. A "podcast", in our view, conforms to a de-facto standard, the RSS feed. This is what ensures its openness. You have choices about where to host it. Your listeners have choices of where to consume it.
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    Of course, I agree, I don't like any of it. And it's going on with or without Apple, they are playing catch-up not driving it. I am not saying this to "excuse" Apple, I'm interested in no such thing. My point is that stopping Apple wouldn't stop it. I don't know how to stop it. It's sad. But I don't listen to spotify podcasts, even when some of my favorites get absorbed by them.
- BonoboIO 4y ago
  There are ways to get the off files and create your own rss, because their player is sh*t … i Heard ;-)
fernly 4y ago
> even choosing to download the audio in Apple Podcasts makes it available for offline listening, but doesn’t produce an MP3 or M4A file that you can move around or archive—it retains its DRM. Can this be solved by use of, e.g. Audio Hijack? (https://rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/ https://rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/)
- ascagnel_ 4y ago
  I have a Wiim Mini, which is an Airplay receiver (which supports high-bitrate playback) with analog outs (so you can connect it to older stereo equipment). If an all-software solution won't work, you can still rely on the analog hole.
mikl 4y ago
> Under the hood, Apple stopped having each device request a copy of RSS feeds. Instead, Apple’s servers would request the feed once, and the Apple Podcasts app on your Mac or iOS device would ping Apple for episode updates. On one hand, you could argue this is a good thing (more anonymous if you trust Apple, significant bandwidth savings for hosting services). On the other hand, it means that you now need to trust that Apple isn’t going to fuck with the podcasts you listen to. Other podcast clients (like Overcast) started doing this long before Apple. If you want to do timely notifications for new episodes, synchronisation, waste less power on the phone doing useless polling, etc., this is a fairly obvious thing to do. And if you’re using Apple’s Podcast app, the server-side crawling changes nothing wrt. their ability to “fuck with” podcasts. They could’ve done that client-side too.
s3p 4y ago
>What I learned is that Apple does not produce an RSS feed for podcasts that they host. That’s right: 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. It’s ludicrous to assume that it’s a good thing for listeners to have to have specific hardware in order to listen to a podcast. Spotify is doing the same thing and has been for years. Nobody seemed to care about it then?
hot_gril 4y ago
So Apple is offering a podcast hosting service, but it uses some proprietary thing instead of RSS and DRM's the audio so other podcast clients can't play them, and the podcast owner can't easily switch to a different podcast host (including one that this post's author runs). It doesn't tell the podcast owner that. I have never used a podcast, so is this all correct? If so, I agree this is a deliberately snaky move on Apple's part.
unosama 4y ago
I'm sorry but you'd have to be a fool to host your podcast on Apple.... I'm shocked that Apple's podcast hosting ever had an option to export the data. I've never used Apple podcasting services for listening because it always seemed like a huge pain designed to lock you in. There's plenty of free Podcast apps out there. And IMHO -- if it doesn't have an RSS feed it's not a podcast. (Looking at you, Patreon Substack Spotify Rokfin etc)
- ryanbrunner 4y ago
  Patreon and Substack do have RSS feeds available.
willi59549879 4y ago
Each apple product is designed this way. It is designed to lock people in and make people conform to the apple certified way. That's what made me leave the eco system. I'll never buy anything from Apple again. I thought everybody knew by now what apple does.
beshrkayali 4y ago
The Podcast Index is created to preserve, protect and extend the open, independent podcasting ecosystem: https://podcastindex.org/ https://podcastindex.org/
grendelt 4y ago
To use Doctorow's term: the "enshittification" of Apple Podcasrs
bilekas 4y ago
> Sure enough, opening the m3u8 playlist, there is Apple Fairplay DRM info. This is just straight up egregious. They are encoding your freely distributed content with their DRM. Without offering any method of removing it. Surely there is some licencing issue there.
karel_3d 4y ago
Aren't there ways to ummm... "circumvent" Apple's DRM? Given that the people migrating the podcasts are the actual copyright owners, that should not even be illegal? (But I am not an expert.) By looking online I see some random software for removing Apple's FairPlay, but it's all commercial.
john_the_writer 4y ago
I find it really odd that one would have all their audio in a cloud service, that they use to send out that podcast. I've got mine on my local computer. I upload those, but I keep the masters.
ESMirro 4y ago
This is pretty clearly Apples attempt to create a Patreon podcast competitor & refers to the “Apple Podcasters Program” [1]. It’s not designed to host regular, free feeds in the traditional RSS style, quite deliberately. When signing up it is made very clear that there is no RSS feed & what the perks/restrictions of joining are. The DRM, the fact there’s no RSS feed, the initial hosting cost - it all stems from the fact this is a service designed to host paid podcasts that subscribers can pay to access - of course it’s going to be closed off and restricted… The header on the documentation page reads “Join the Apple Podcasters Program to start selling your subscriptions on Apple Podcasts”. The article is poorly researched at best and likely thinly disguised marketing for the authors service, knowing most will just take them at their word without digging into the specifics of these ridiculous criticisms. [1] https://podcasters.apple.com/support/892-apple-podcasters-program-overview https://podcasters.apple.com/support/892-apple-podcasters-pr...
pwinnski 4y ago
Is it Apple Podcasts Subscriptions[0]? I don't use their app (Overcast for iOS is great!), so I wasn't familiar with any of this, but most of their site seems focused on the usual podcast stuff, same as it has been for a long time. When I started digging to find the bad behavior, I eventually came across this page about subscriptions. Is the idea that people who have an existing podcast and are tired of paying the S3 or OVH bill (or whatever) look into this "Apple Podcasts Subscriptions" service and it says right up top you can offer your podcast for free. So they click through to the pricing page[1] and see that they can sign up for $20/year and keep offering their show for free, and it isn't clear on the publicly-available pages I've linked so far that this is going to break your podcast, making it no longer freely available everywhere. It's possible that's buried somewhere in the fine print, and given how many lawyers Apple employs, I'd be shocked if it's not. Still, this is BAD behavior, a bait-and-switch. It's possible to offer podcasts by subscription. Even on their own list of hosting providers[2] they mention Blubrry, Libsyn, Omny, and RSS.com, all of which do that. (Most of them charge more than $20/year for hosting, too.) But critically, all of those still offer a feed so you can listen in the app of your choice. Once you take away the feed and lock it down to only your app, you're not producing a podcast anymore. You're producing an on-demand audio show, like Spotify does. I get the appeal. Spotify and Apple both can say "using our app, you can listen to any podcast, PLUS a bunch of shows exclusive to us!" But of course, Spotify's exclusives can't be listened to in Apple Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts exclusives can't be listened to in Spotify, because they're not actually podcasts at that point. Apple should know better. They're usually better than this. Shame on Apple. 0. https://podcasters.apple.com/878-subscriptions https://podcasters.apple.com/878-subscriptions 1. https://podcasters.apple.com/support/904-availability-of-apple-podcasts-features https://podcasters.apple.com/support/904-availability-of-app... 2. https://podcasters.apple.com/partner-search https://podcasters.apple.com/partner-search

401 points by jeremiahlee 4y ago

[dead]

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').

harshitaneja 4y ago
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?
- EvanAnderson 4y ago
  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...) [0] https://tt-rss.org/ https://tt-rss.org/
  - harshitaneja 4y ago
    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.
nofreelunch 4y ago
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.
greedo 4y ago
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...
_Algernon_ 4y ago
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.

jjcon 4y ago

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 https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/19/22791968/apple-podcasts-star-score-review-prompt https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/19/22791968/apple-podcasts-...

chrisoverzero 4y ago
> 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.
- jjcon 4y ago
  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 https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/19/podcasts-rating-prompt-app-store-reviews/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/19/podcasts-rating-prompt-... EDIT: Actually - found a screenshot mid-podcast: https://i.imgur.com/dnqcAbQ.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/dnqcAbQ.jpeg
  - jrmg 4y ago
    This is just the standard alert from the SKStoreReviewController API that any app can use. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/ratings-and-reviews/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/ratings-and-reviews/
    - jjcon 4y ago
      Right but explicitly calling it during a playing podcast is obviously confusing - just look at the review section: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apple-podcasts/id525463029 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apple-podcasts/id525463029

mikece 4y ago

"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. [1] https://podcasting20.substack.com/p/podping https://podcasting20.substack.com/p/podping

bastawhiz 4y ago
> creating DDoS levels of traffic 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.
- georgel 4y ago
  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.
  - bastawhiz 4y ago
    Audio insertion is actually straightforward: the audio URLs from the feed can redirect!
- 4y ago

arthurofbabylon 4y ago

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.

jrochkind1 4y ago
> keep being the de facto provider, 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-podcasts-controversy 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?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

cosmotic 4y ago

I stopped using Apple Podcasts because 1) they killed connectivity to my iPod; 2) the app is extremely buggy; and 3) the app is totally unusable.

browningstreet 4y ago
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.
- wingworks 4y ago
  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)
  - ezfe 4y ago
    There is Overcast on Mac for Apple silicon devices
    - wingworks 4y ago
      There is? wow. (though I'm still rock'n an Intel Mac)
      - hrrsn 4y ago
        It's the iPad app but it works well enough on macOS
      - danaris 4y ago

Orlan 4y ago

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.

jxdxbx 4y ago

Apple Podcasts does not have a silence-trimming feature, which is reason enough to not use it. It would be nice if you could have a single podcast RSS backend with multiple client apps, like you can with text RSS.

joeconway 4y ago
Almost every podcast client has OPML export there is no need for a single backend to host that. Such a service would like end up awful, like Feedly
- jxdxbx 4y ago
  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.

paulette449 4y ago

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]. [1] - https://joeisanerd.com https://joeisanerd.com

arwhatever 4y ago
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.
- willhslade 4y ago
  Broken is better than unreliable.
- laweijfmvo 4y ago
  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.
- smcl 4y ago
  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 :)

crazygringo 4y ago

> 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.

dabernathy89 4y ago
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.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  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.
  - bastawhiz 4y ago
    > 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.

howinteresting 4y ago

Wait -- there are podcasts you just can't listen to if you don't have an Apple device? That's beyond absurd.

theshrike79 4y ago
There are also podcasts you can only listen to on Spotify. Also absurd.
- oezi 4y ago
  Enough podcasts to listen to that aren't on any of these platforms. Give me RSS or death.
- froglets 4y ago
  There’s also a growing number of podcasts you can only listen to if you subscribe to Amazon Music.
- vanilla_nut 4y ago
  If it's not primarily available on RSS, it's a not a podcast IMO. I prefer to call Spotify exclusives "Spodcasts."
pwinnski 4y ago
Technically you can listen to them using iTunes for Windows, but it's still absurd. It's a closed system, which podcasting should not be.

voytec 4y ago

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.

tokamak-teapot 4y ago
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? [1] https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202190 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202190
- voytec 4y ago
  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.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  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.
  - 4y ago

lancesells 4y ago

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+.

friend_and_foe 4y ago

I don't know why anyone is surprised. Apple's entire business model is trapping unwitting potential customers.

wwalexander 4y ago

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.

miguelazo 4y ago

More great fodder for the antitrust trials.

karavelov 4y ago

Would GDPR request under Article 15 work to get your data out?

jackson1442 4y ago

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.

bastawhiz 4y ago
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.

iddan 4y ago

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.

TheRealNGenius 4y ago
[dead]

jobs_throwaway 4y ago

> 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. Sounds like a lot of what Apple does!

janalsncm 4y ago

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.

sircastor 4y ago
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.

praisewhitey 4y ago

>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.

pwinnski 4y ago

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.

julienb_sea 4y ago

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.

brunoTbear 4y ago
I think the author's point would be that Apple is doing this to non-serious or not-serious-yet podcasters. 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.
- ascagnel_ 4y ago
  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.
bastawhiz 4y ago
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.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

Would love to see the whiteboards at Apple showing all the flow chart strategies to trap people with DRM.

Animats 4y ago

Ah, Apple. Watch the classic Apple "Rip, Mix, Burn" commercial.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBPp-h3uNs8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBPp-h3uNs8

freetime2 4y ago

> 40% is nothing to shake a stick at. If you entered the podcasting space (like Spotify did) and captured 40% of users, you’d have an amazing product. Didn't Spotify spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get exclusive rights to podcasts (Joe Rogan comes to mind)? That isn't very innovative, and it actively reduces the choice and competition in the marketplace. Good for Joe Rogan though (allegedly) getting $200+ million out of Spotify.

vanilla_nut 4y ago
Good for Joe. Bad for Spotify users. I would personally much rather they invested in fixing bugs and UI problems with $200 million... than acquiring one (highly controversial, increasingly irrelevant) podcast. As someone who doesn't particularly like Rogan's work (no offense to anyone who does!), I guess I'm glad Spotify hastened his decline by walling him off in their private garden.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

CharlesW 4y ago

> Here’s what’s fucked: once you’ve started using Apple for hosting, you’re stuck. The fundamental misunderstanding is that Apple is not hosting the source RSS feed or media. As someone who operates a podcast hosting service, it's bizarre to me that the author doesn't understand this. > This customer was pasting their Apple listing URL, but the import tool was not getting a feed back. Of course, because it's not an RSS feed URL. And again, I'm shocked that this person doesn't understand the difference.

duxup 4y ago
They also describe not being able to download the content they uploaded. That makes me wonder if they aren’t keeping their own original files… that would be strange too.
bastawhiz 4y ago
> The fundamental misunderstanding is that Apple is not hosting the source RSS feed or media. As someone who operates a podcast hosting service, it's bizarre to me that the author doesn't understand this. Please Google the Apple Podcasters Program, launched in 2021. This absolutely exists and is distinct from shows that they only list in their directory. They absolutely host the source material. I signed up for it myself to test! > Of course, because it's not an RSS feed URL. And again, I'm shocked that this person doesn't understand the difference. Apple exposes a public API that returns the listing metadata given the podcast ID (extracted from the end of the listing URL). That contains the RSS feed URL. You can test this with a service like getrssfeed.com. Other hosts like Transistor also offer this convenience. Perhaps you should do a little more keeping up with the podcast industry if you're one of my competitors? ;)
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > They absolutely host the source material. I signed up for it myself to test! Technically you're right, which everyone knows is the best kind — the transcoded and DRM encrypted audio has to live somewhere. If you want to call that "hosting" that's fine, but "podcast hosting" usually means what you presumably do — RSS feeds pointing to standards-based, unencrypted audio (and even video) files. What Apple "hosts" is a transformed, proprietary distribution format, which enables the kinds of use cases that Apple Podcasters Program unlocks.

tomxor 4y ago

> That’s right: 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. It’s ludicrous to assume that it’s a good thing for listeners to have to have specific hardware in order to listen to a podcast. I'm gona keep shouting this from the rooftops and maybe it will eventually sink in for some people: Apple's end game is vertical integration, it's "lock-in" on steroids. When they own every product or service in the stack, they can tune one product (like podcasts) to serve the purposes of another, even when it appears to hurt a product and it's users individually, because it benefits Apple as a whole. I get that Apple stuff is generally a nice experience and there is genuinely lots of cool technology, but people need to understand the future they are buying into with Apple. The deeper someone gets, the more painful it's going to be when that table flip moment comes, because that table has the weight of the whole Apple ecosystem holding it down - and so people will unconsciously endure much pain before doing so (lest they lose access to their podcasts); If that table flip moment comes with a competitor for an _individual_ service like this one, it's going to be a tiny inconvenience, and so users will endure less, and the product owner has more market pressure to provide a good service as the friction to change is low. Those passionate about Apple will argue with individual counter examples, but the core issue is the broader strategy that does not have user interests at heart. It's honestly heartbreaking as someone who grew up with and loved Apple computers, they hung onto the concept of holism from the 80s in making the whole computer and it has produced some excellent machines. But now the same strategy is being twisted into something that actively works against the user instead.

sneak 4y ago
To wit: you can't use the new hardware 2FA passkeys on iOS unless you opt in to iCloud and all of the surveillance that entails.
- TylerE 4y ago
  Why is that surprising since the keys are specifically for logging into iCloud? Do you complaine your gasoline car doesn’t have a diesel tank?

Tagbert 4y ago

How does this relate to the thousands of podcasts that are listed in the iTunes podcast directory and that are freely playable on any podcast app on any platform? Is this for a special set of podcasts that are using Apple's system to manage access to paid subscriptions? If that is the case, then this seems reasonable.

bastawhiz 4y ago
This is unrelated to the vast majority of shows that just use Apple as a directory
- Tagbert 4y ago
  Thank you

mark_l_watson 4y ago

I was interested to read the article and comments here because I am a very happy user of Apple Podcasts, but had not thought about the service from a content creator standpoint. One question I had is: if you want to make money from a podcast, is it really so bad to just pick one platform like Apple Podcasts, or YouTube, or, etc.? As a small business, isn’t having one simple to use platform pretty good? Also, I have experienced ‘free’ access to one Premium podcast, and I never minded that I only got to listen to part of it. That was Sam Harris’s podcast, and I would be surprised if that was an Apple exclusive, so how does that work? Off topic, but: I love the Apple Podcast service. I only subscribe to about ten podcasts, but that is enough for lots of good content, and I wear an Apple Watch and almost always have my AirPods with me, so the podcasts are always easy to get to.

bastawhiz 4y ago
Author here. I run pinecast.com, which offers paid subscriptions for Podcasters as one of the features. You can do what Apple does without looking yourself to one platform. Pinecast is hardly the only service that offers this, as well.

vk6flab 4y ago

I have produced a weekly podcast about amateur radio since 2011. It was hosted on S3 since I started because it became immediately clear that any other option would put my content under the control of someone who did not have my best interest at heart. Today it's mirrored across dozens of aggregators, converted to eBooks, converted to Morse Code, uploaded to YouTube, posted on social media, emailed to listeners and included in magazine articles and news broadcasts across the globe. All the content is still under my direct control. As for making money, not so much. I'd have to check my accounts for an exact number, but $500 over that time is about right. It highlights to me that someone is making money from podcasting, but that someone is not me and I doubt it's any different for the vast majority of podcast producers. I think as a society we need to figure out how content creators can be remunerated for their efforts and not perpetuate the current model where "facilitators" in all their varied guises make all the money.

oehpr 4y ago
I've thought a lot about this, and I still scratch my head over what might work. The system I think kinda fits is bug bounties. Someone registers a problem, a need, and submits a reward for filling it. Others who have that problem can add to the pot, and eventually someone can claim the pot by filling the request, with the fruits of that labor available to all. But, there are obvious holes here. Like what constitutes "filling that request". In the context of actual bug bounties, at the minimum the bug goes away. For something like a painting? A podcast? I need a beautiful sunset" - "Here's this photo of the sun setting that I took outside the safeway" - - "nah." - "Here's this hand crafted lovingly painted canvas I made over the course of 3 weeks" - - "nah. (but I'll just save a copy of that thanks)" Honestly I don't know! I want endeavors like yours to be fairly compensated for the value it adds to society, but the core of our society and how we transact is rooted in scarcity. Data isn't scarce. Novelty is. Attention is. But not data.

hardwaresofton 4y ago

I’m surprised there hasn’t been more public outcry by hosters about this. This is a huge affront to how the podcast ecosystem works. Well this is going to be a problem for podcastsaver as well. What s scummy move by Apple, the nice thing about podcasts is that it’s a very open technology — all you needed was RSS. Syndicate with apple but don’t host your data exclusively there.

WirelessGigabit 4y ago

Weird, I've extracted Podcasts from my iPhone's backup, which I can play on any device. Also, the Apple Podcast app shows you episodes that are subscription only, and you cannot mark them as 'played', they stay there, on top, taunting you...

jrochkind1 4y ago

Spotify podcasts don't have RSS feeds either. And have massively expanded their podcast program over the past few years, such that they know serve more podcast listeners than Apple. But this is the play several big players are involved in make to try to convert podcasts into walled gardens. The OP is really sniping around the edges of a major thing that's going on, which Apple is actually playing catch-up on. https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/will-spotify-ruin-podcasting https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/will-spotify-ruin-podcast... https://fair.org/home/the-new-podcast-oligopoly/ https://fair.org/home/the-new-podcast-oligopoly/ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/23/techscape-spotify-podcasts-joe-rogan https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/23/techscape...

Trumpi 4y ago
Well, the old-timers (such as me) don't really like what Spotify are doing either. A "podcast", in our view, conforms to a de-facto standard, the RSS feed. This is what ensures its openness. You have choices about where to host it. Your listeners have choices of where to consume it.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  Of course, I agree, I don't like any of it. And it's going on with or without Apple, they are playing catch-up not driving it. I am not saying this to "excuse" Apple, I'm interested in no such thing. My point is that stopping Apple wouldn't stop it. I don't know how to stop it. It's sad. But I don't listen to spotify podcasts, even when some of my favorites get absorbed by them.
BonoboIO 4y ago
There are ways to get the off files and create your own rss, because their player is sh*t … i Heard ;-)

fernly 4y ago

> even choosing to download the audio in Apple Podcasts makes it available for offline listening, but doesn’t produce an MP3 or M4A file that you can move around or archive—it retains its DRM. Can this be solved by use of, e.g. Audio Hijack? (https://rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/ https://rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/)

ascagnel_ 4y ago
I have a Wiim Mini, which is an Airplay receiver (which supports high-bitrate playback) with analog outs (so you can connect it to older stereo equipment). If an all-software solution won't work, you can still rely on the analog hole.

mikl 4y ago

> Under the hood, Apple stopped having each device request a copy of RSS feeds. Instead, Apple’s servers would request the feed once, and the Apple Podcasts app on your Mac or iOS device would ping Apple for episode updates. On one hand, you could argue this is a good thing (more anonymous if you trust Apple, significant bandwidth savings for hosting services). On the other hand, it means that you now need to trust that Apple isn’t going to fuck with the podcasts you listen to. Other podcast clients (like Overcast) started doing this long before Apple. If you want to do timely notifications for new episodes, synchronisation, waste less power on the phone doing useless polling, etc., this is a fairly obvious thing to do. And if you’re using Apple’s Podcast app, the server-side crawling changes nothing wrt. their ability to “fuck with” podcasts. They could’ve done that client-side too.

s3p 4y ago

>What I learned is that Apple does not produce an RSS feed for podcasts that they host. That’s right: 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. It’s ludicrous to assume that it’s a good thing for listeners to have to have specific hardware in order to listen to a podcast. Spotify is doing the same thing and has been for years. Nobody seemed to care about it then?

hot_gril 4y ago

So Apple is offering a podcast hosting service, but it uses some proprietary thing instead of RSS and DRM's the audio so other podcast clients can't play them, and the podcast owner can't easily switch to a different podcast host (including one that this post's author runs). It doesn't tell the podcast owner that. I have never used a podcast, so is this all correct? If so, I agree this is a deliberately snaky move on Apple's part.

unosama 4y ago

I'm sorry but you'd have to be a fool to host your podcast on Apple.... I'm shocked that Apple's podcast hosting ever had an option to export the data. I've never used Apple podcasting services for listening because it always seemed like a huge pain designed to lock you in. There's plenty of free Podcast apps out there. And IMHO -- if it doesn't have an RSS feed it's not a podcast. (Looking at you, Patreon Substack Spotify Rokfin etc)

ryanbrunner 4y ago
Patreon and Substack do have RSS feeds available.

willi59549879 4y ago

Each apple product is designed this way. It is designed to lock people in and make people conform to the apple certified way. That's what made me leave the eco system. I'll never buy anything from Apple again. I thought everybody knew by now what apple does.

beshrkayali 4y ago

The Podcast Index is created to preserve, protect and extend the open, independent podcasting ecosystem: https://podcastindex.org/ https://podcastindex.org/

grendelt 4y ago

To use Doctorow's term: the "enshittification" of Apple Podcasrs

bilekas 4y ago

> Sure enough, opening the m3u8 playlist, there is Apple Fairplay DRM info. This is just straight up egregious. They are encoding your freely distributed content with their DRM. Without offering any method of removing it. Surely there is some licencing issue there.

karel_3d 4y ago

Aren't there ways to ummm... "circumvent" Apple's DRM? Given that the people migrating the podcasts are the actual copyright owners, that should not even be illegal? (But I am not an expert.) By looking online I see some random software for removing Apple's FairPlay, but it's all commercial.

john_the_writer 4y ago

I find it really odd that one would have all their audio in a cloud service, that they use to send out that podcast. I've got mine on my local computer. I upload those, but I keep the masters.

ESMirro 4y ago

This is pretty clearly Apples attempt to create a Patreon podcast competitor & refers to the “Apple Podcasters Program” [1]. It’s not designed to host regular, free feeds in the traditional RSS style, quite deliberately. When signing up it is made very clear that there is no RSS feed & what the perks/restrictions of joining are. The DRM, the fact there’s no RSS feed, the initial hosting cost - it all stems from the fact this is a service designed to host paid podcasts that subscribers can pay to access - of course it’s going to be closed off and restricted… The header on the documentation page reads “Join the Apple Podcasters Program to start selling your subscriptions on Apple Podcasts”. The article is poorly researched at best and likely thinly disguised marketing for the authors service, knowing most will just take them at their word without digging into the specifics of these ridiculous criticisms. [1] https://podcasters.apple.com/support/892-apple-podcasters-program-overview https://podcasters.apple.com/support/892-apple-podcasters-pr...

pwinnski 4y ago

Is it Apple Podcasts Subscriptions[0]? I don't use their app (Overcast for iOS is great!), so I wasn't familiar with any of this, but most of their site seems focused on the usual podcast stuff, same as it has been for a long time. When I started digging to find the bad behavior, I eventually came across this page about subscriptions. Is the idea that people who have an existing podcast and are tired of paying the S3 or OVH bill (or whatever) look into this "Apple Podcasts Subscriptions" service and it says right up top you can offer your podcast for free. So they click through to the pricing page[1] and see that they can sign up for $20/year and keep offering their show for free, and it isn't clear on the publicly-available pages I've linked so far that this is going to break your podcast, making it no longer freely available everywhere. It's possible that's buried somewhere in the fine print, and given how many lawyers Apple employs, I'd be shocked if it's not. Still, this is BAD behavior, a bait-and-switch. It's possible to offer podcasts by subscription. Even on their own list of hosting providers[2] they mention Blubrry, Libsyn, Omny, and RSS.com, all of which do that. (Most of them charge more than $20/year for hosting, too.) But critically, all of those still offer a feed so you can listen in the app of your choice. Once you take away the feed and lock it down to only your app, you're not producing a podcast anymore. You're producing an on-demand audio show, like Spotify does. I get the appeal. Spotify and Apple both can say "using our app, you can listen to any podcast, PLUS a bunch of shows exclusive to us!" But of course, Spotify's exclusives can't be listened to in Apple Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts exclusives can't be listened to in Spotify, because they're not actually podcasts at that point. Apple should know better. They're usually better than this. Shame on Apple. 0. https://podcasters.apple.com/878-subscriptions https://podcasters.apple.com/878-subscriptions 1. https://podcasters.apple.com/support/904-availability-of-apple-podcasts-features https://podcasters.apple.com/support/904-availability-of-app... 2. https://podcasters.apple.com/partner-search https://podcasters.apple.com/partner-search