> 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

> 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.