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The audacity of Apple Podcasts

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Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#181

Post by smcl »

arwhatever wrote: post #39
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

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.

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 :)

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#182

Post by thatfrenchguy »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #144
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…

Beyond hardware integrations between their own HW, their software/services are odd and don't interoperate with conventional things. I used iphoto or whatever it was called and it had proprietary storage which was a huge turn off for me. Its never clear if a point of sale terminal accepts Apple Pay and where to hold your device so I avoid using it since chances are I have to get out a card anyway. Their podcast app ha…

> if a point of sale terminal accepts Apple Pay and where to hold your device

It's pretty obvious, it says "tap to pay" and has the logo on it?

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#183

Post by hot_gril »

ted_bunny wrote: post #166
KyeRussell wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You including your Apple Pay gripe in that list is a misattributed laughable Americanism instead of the jab at Apple that you intend it to be.

Why's that?

Something about the shitty metric system I'll bet

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#184

Post by hot_gril »

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #182
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond hardware integrations between their own HW, their software/services are odd and don't interoperate with conventional things. I used iphoto or whatever it was called and it had proprietary storage which was a huge turn off for me. Its never clear if a point of sale terminal accepts Apple Pay and where to hold your device so I avoid using it since chances are I have to get out a card anyway. Their podcast app ha…

> if a point of sale terminal accepts Apple Pay and where to hold your device It's pretty obvious, it says "tap to pay" and has the logo on it?

Some of these terminals are oddly designed. Often the screen says "tap to pay," but you tap something above it that's not clearly marked, not the screen. Enough of the others have you tap the screen that you think it's that. Or a part says "Apple Pay," but that's just advertising the feature, and there's some unmarked area to tap.

But even for the ones that are decent, idk why I'd not just use my credit card.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#186

Post by neilparikh »

ted_bunny wrote: post #166
KyeRussell wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You including your Apple Pay gripe in that list is a misattributed laughable Americanism instead of the jab at Apple that you intend it to be.

Why's that?

I'm guessing their point was that in many other countries (ex. Canada), tap to pay is pretty much universally supported for many years, to the point where I'm surprised when a merchant doesn't have it. The majority of my transactions in Canada were tap to pay as far back as 2018.

It's also worth noting that Apple Pay isn't its own protocol, it just does the same thing as the tap to pay built into cards, so not at all within Apple's control how much it's supported or how the terminal works.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#187

Post by kemayo »

hot_gril wrote: post #184
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if a point of sale terminal accepts Apple Pay and where to hold your device It's pretty obvious, it says "tap to pay" and has the logo on it?

Some of these terminals are oddly designed. Often the screen says "tap to pay," but you tap something above it that's not clearly marked, not the screen. Enough of the others have you tap the screen that you think it's that. Or a part says "Apple Pay," but that's just advertising the feature, and there's some unmarked area to tap. But even for the ones that are decent, idk why I'd not just use my credit card.

Well, then you'll just tap it in the same place that you'd tap your credit card. ;)

I.e. less-snarkily, nothing about that complaint relates to Apple Pay, just to how contactless payments work in general, whether they're from a phone or from a card. Most cards are contactless -- even in the USA -- these days, in my experience.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#188

Post by hot_gril »

kemayo wrote: post #187
hot_gril wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of these terminals are oddly designed. Often the screen says "tap to pay," but you tap something above it that's not clearly marked, not the screen. Enough of the others have you tap the screen that you think it's that. Or a part says "Apple Pay," but that's just advertising the feature, and there's some unmarked area to tap. But even for the ones that are decent, idk why I'd not just use my credit card.

Well, then you'll just tap it in the same place that you'd tap your credit card. ;) I.e. less-snarkily, nothing about that complaint relates to Apple Pay, just to how contactless payments work in general, whether they're from a phone or from a card. Most cards are contactless -- even in the USA -- these days, in my experience.

Yeah, but you can also insert the card into the chip reader and not deal with the NFC stuff. Anyway, it's not an Apple-specific complaint.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#189

Post by mikl »

> 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.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#190

Post by Nullabillity »

MBCook wrote: post #170
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…

Apple has controlled the podcast industry through the iTunes podcast directory since day one. They’ve been benevolent and haven’t cracked down on things. They let basically any podcast in for free. They let 3rd party clients use their directory for free. They ARE the podcast industry. And they’ve been open. I see this purely as a reaction to Spotify and Google and others trying to grab and control the industry with p…

So the charitable interpretation is that they're trying to compete with Spotify's walled garden, by... doing the same thing themselves?

This also doesn't help them compete with Spotify anyway, since they use their own directory and hosting system. The only ones hurt here are third-party clients and end users. The ones you think they're trying to "protect".

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