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The audacity of Apple Podcasts

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Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#121

Post by [deleted] »

timerol wrote: post #31
moogleii wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit out of the loop but wouldn't hosts have the original source material that they uploaded? Similar to how users have the source images/videos to whatever they upload to TikTok and Instagram? I suspect neither offer an export either. Additionally, the author complains that an Apple Podcast user has to go through the app (and all its restrictions), but again, not that different from Instagram posts. As a user,…

It's perfectly reasonable for a user to pay a big company for hosting, and then delete their local copies, since they paid for hosting. And then assume that, because their data is publicly available, that they'll be able to download that information. Getting your photos off of Instagram is easy, according to the top 10 search results for "Instagram photo downloader". But even then, the distinction that you're not pay…

[deleted]

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#122

Post by bastawhiz »

SllX wrote: post #80
janalsncm wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t agree that signing an agreement means Apple gets to behave however they want within the confines of the law. A contract should not be something that one hides behind, but something that someone holds up as enshrining a shared, common sense understanding of an agreement. The fact that an Apple Podcasts user tried to do something that is 1) not unreasonable given other podcasting platforms and 2) not clearly un…

If you’re a hobbyist, you might go “oh no, this won’t work out, Overcast users can’t see my podcast” and switch hosting providers. If you’re going into podcasting as a business, don’t skimp on having a lawyer review the things you’ll be signing up and paying for, and if you skimp on that and get unlucky, expect to be doing the work required to move providers if what you signed up for isn’t satisfactory. It’s really t…

> expect only exactly what the service offers in the agreement, and if the terms are not satisfactory, go sign with someone else.

You can't go somewhere else, because going somewhere else means starting over from scratch. That's the whole point of my post: you're locked in. The customer who reached out with this issue has hundreds of episodes and can't reasonably manually reupload them all to another service.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#123

Post by thewebcount »

paulette449 wrote: post #14

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

Thank you for pointing out this app! I've been looking for a podcasting app that isn't Apple's and doesn't require you to create an account and store stuff in the cloud. (I just want to access publicly available RSS feeds! How hard is that?)

And man, Apple's Podcast app is terrible. I can't believe how buggy it is, nor can I believe how awful the UI is. It's shocking how bad it is when I compare it to other Apple apps that I love (things like Logic and FCP). Even boring apps like Pages and Numbers are really well made. But they completely dropped the ball on Podcasts and Music. It's bizarre.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#124

Post by sneak »

tomxor wrote: post #102

> 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…

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.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#125

Post by bastawhiz »

filoleg wrote: post #92
makeitdouble wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> requires downloading podcasts in itunes on your desktop, and then manually transferring them to your Android phone after finding the locally stored files. TFA says they're DRMed, are they still readable on a random android client just by moving the files ?

That part of TFA confused me as well, because I just tested it out on my Win10 desktop, and it worked effortlessly. I didn't even have to search for the local files. iTunes had a nice "Show in Windows Explorer" button next to the episode I downloaded, which opened a directory with the mp3 audio file for the episode (neatly tagged and named and all). I opened it with VLC and confirmed that the playback works perfectly…

Here's an example show, I'm curious if it works for you: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/test-podcast/id1667708...

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#126

Post by makeitdouble »

tcarn wrote: post #104
filoleg wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That part of TFA confused me as well, because I just tested it out on my Win10 desktop, and it worked effortlessly. I didn't even have to search for the local files. iTunes had a nice "Show in Windows Explorer" button next to the episode I downloaded, which opened a directory with the mp3 audio file for the episode (neatly tagged and named and all). I opened it with VLC and confirmed that the playback works perfectly…

Wow, this is a great workaround then to the author's issue.

For sure, it's nice to know there's an out for people willing to work it out.

TBF, I'd assume the author knows there would be workarounds, like de-DRM the iTunes files. Or go full analog loophole style and rerecord the podcast audio etc.

The point was probably how shitty of an experience it stayed for people outside the Apple bubble (podcasts are really about convenience. I only started seriously listening to them once I got an iPhone, because of the sheer inconvenience of having to plug and drag files from my desktop for every new episode)

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#127

Post by bastawhiz »

CharlesW wrote: post #94
karaterobot wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple isn't taking away self-hosted RSS podcast feeds. It's presenting a separate paid subscription experience within its Podcasts app. No "audacity" about it. If you don't want that as a creator, don't use it. It sounded to me like the audacious part was that they don't make it clear that, once you sign up for this service, your users cannot get your podcast in any other way than using Apple Podcasts, and you will…

> It sounded to me like the audacious part was that they don't make it clear that, once you sign up for this service, your users cannot get your podcast in any other way than using Apple Podcasts… You definitely can. What the author said was, "What I learned is that Apple does not produce an RSS feed for podcasts that they host". But this is misplaced outrage on the author's part, since Apple has never produced RSS f…

Every other podcast hosting service in existence provides RSS feeds. But unless you've already done your homework and you're starting a podcast, you don't know why not having one is important.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#128

Post by thewebcount »

makeitdouble wrote: post #91
tokamak-teapot wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Home Sharing covers some of it, but the limitations of requiring everything physically on the same network and logged into the same Apple ID sound way more stringent. Even for a family for instance, it means they'd all have to share the same ID, which would be a royal PITA, especially if you're setting parental controls for the kids.

You can have multiple people in your family share different things from their devices. When I go to home sharing in the TV.app, I see both my computer and my spouse's.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#129

Post by layer8 »

mikece wrote: post #71
djl0 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 check…

Depends on the podcast and the users. If I know my favorite afternoon commute podcast drops at 4:30 PM local and I don't see it by 4:45 PM, I'm going to be doing the pull-to-refresh thing frequently, hoping it's available to download before I leave the WiFi at work for my drive home. I suppose Podping plus push notification to all app installs subscribed to the podcast that just updated would be another way to do it.

> I'm going to be doing the pull-to-refresh thing frequently

Such refreshs would be using If-Modified-Since, so shouldn’t cause substantial traffic.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#130

Post by bastawhiz »

Tagbert wrote: post #105

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.

This is unrelated to the vast majority of shows that just use Apple as a directory
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