The audacity of Apple Podcasts
basta.substack.com
The audacity of Apple Podcasts
1–10 of 327 posts
Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts
#2I 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').
Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts
#3"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.
Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts
#4The 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-...
Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts
#5Reading 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.
Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts
#6The 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-...
> 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.
Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts
#7I 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.
Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts
#8I 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…
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?
Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts
#9"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…
> 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.
Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts
#10"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…
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?