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The audacity of Apple Podcasts

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Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#201

Post by ouid »

hot_gril wrote: post #178
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…

I don't use enough tech stuff to care. I have an iPhone and a Mac, and they go together in a few ways like iMessage, but that's not the reason I have both. They're just good products. I would swap one of them out if I didn't like it. The deeper integrations are just toys; why would I even remotely need a Homepod or an Apple Watch? Why would I use the crappy News app on my Mac instead of a web browser? The scarier thi…

What you are noticing is that competition is literally the worst strategy that corporations can adopt with respect to each other. Apple and Samsung probably have the keys to each other's destruction, but destroying the other would be bad because the remaining party would become a "monopoly" which is a loss condition, So the destruction is mutually assured, and intrinsic cooperation is possible. There's more money to be made cooperating, so the result is we lose the headphone jack.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#202

Post by freewizard »

bastawhiz wrote: post #30
crazygringo wrote: post #15

> 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 subscript…

Author here. > If you're charging a subscription fee The DRM applies even if you charge no fee. > why would you expect Apple to make it available to competing podcast apps Because every single other podcast hosting service does, with the exception of folks that signed a contract with Spotify. > If you post something on TikTok it doesn't show up on people's Facebook feeds. It can, actually. You can post a link. If I u…

> The DRM applies even if you charge no fee.

Thank you. This is important to call out this, as DRM a paid episode seems a practical solution, but DRM free episode is absolutely taking aways reasonable options from creators and audiences.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#203

Post by vanilla_nut »

freetime2 wrote: post #97

> 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+ mi…

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.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#204

Post by greedo »

bastawhiz wrote: post #122
SllX wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the user is having trouble migrating off Apple's hosting, they'd still have trouble migrating to a different host. Uploading hundreds of episodes and all the corresponding tagging/metadata is a pain no matter what.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#205

Post by cocacola1 »

l33tbro wrote: post #45
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

Overcast really destroys everything else I've used for listening to a podcast. Simple and intuitive UI, customizable streaming/download settings, quickly add any podcast - and that's at the free level. I would never go back to Apple or even Spotify. I rarely get enthusiastic about apps, but it's awesome when one clearly demonstrates a team having gone 'how can we get this right'?

+1 for Overcast. Easily my most used app, even more than Music.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#206

Post by vanilla_nut »

theshrike79 wrote: post #36
howinteresting wrote: post #26

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

There are also podcasts you can only listen to on Spotify. Also absurd.

If it's not primarily available on RSS, it's a not a podcast IMO. I prefer to call Spotify exclusives "Spodcasts."

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#207

Post by astrange »

hot_gril wrote: post #200
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe my gripe is a few years old before chip cards became prevalent here in US. You get my point, the lowest common denominator is a card so if my phone isn’t going to work for whatever reason and I have to dig out my card, I’d prefer to just dig out my card. The only time I use Apple Pay is on the phone in their app store, otherwise it’s just irrelevant.

Yeah I never use Apple Pay, it's useless

Apple Pay is different from an NFC card tap because it's authenticated. This rarely matters in the US but it can in other countries.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#208

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

MBCook wrote: post #193
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Can't speak for all Apple users, but the way a lot of my friends talk about their phones - it is crystal clear they think they're better than you if you don't have an iPhone. I imagine this subset of users would be glad that people without iP…

As someone who loves Apple stuff: what kind of people are you hanging out with? I’ve never heard an adult I interact with express that. My Android using friends don’t care.

I cannot tell you the amount of times my friends mentioned Green Bubble to me as an insult.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#210

Post by asiachick »

hot_gril wrote: post #178
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…

I don't use enough tech stuff to care. I have an iPhone and a Mac, and they go together in a few ways like iMessage, but that's not the reason I have both. They're just good products. I would swap one of them out if I didn't like it. The deeper integrations are just toys; why would I even remotely need a Homepod or an Apple Watch? Why would I use the crappy News app on my Mac instead of a web browser? The scarier thi…

someone will turn this into politics at some point. Someone will promote that reds use Android and Windows PCs, blues use iPhone and Macs. Then you'll need to fall in line or get cancelled.

not looking forward to it.

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