Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pocket Casts, you altered the deal, so I will alter your app

blog.matthewbrunelle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 150 posts

Re: Pocket Casts, you altered the deal, so I will alter your app

#111

Post by photomatt »

vorpalhex wrote: post #42
wmichelin wrote: post #3

To play devil's advocate here, clearly there are hosting costs and maintenance costs beyond a one time mobile app payment 14 years ago. Kinda sped read the article so apologies if I missed it, but why does the author here feel so entitled to something that clearly the company feels unreasonable to continuously maintain? They're clearly a struggling business, it feels like this author has a personal vendetta against t…

What is PocketCasts maintaining? 1. A few kb of playlists and accounts 2. Probably a search service 3. Likely artwork caching It's not free to run this.. but it's not exactly expensive either. Many users pay and don't use the app very much. I am sure there are some super users who use a lot. And most apps continue to sell, make enough income to fund a few devs and keep the services on. Even with a one time payment. I…

We don't disclose Pocket Casts revenue directly, but we invest $millions a year in its development and hosting. It gets very broad usage and has over ten million of listening hours a week. There are clients maintained and new features developed for iPhone, iPad, MacOS, Apple Watch, Android Phones and Tablets, and an open web version.

Re: Pocket Casts, you altered the deal, so I will alter your app

#112

Post by photomatt »

scarface_74 wrote: post #40

Just a note: Overcast is written and maintained by one person - Marco Arment - including server maintenance and has been for over a decade. He also created his own non scammy ad platform that just lets companies buy banner ads based on the category of the podcast. You get very little extra for the $15/year subscription fee. That’s not a complaint. You get all of the features that most people care about in the Fred ve…

I'm a big fan of Marco! We link to Overcast in our web feeds and such.

Re: Pocket Casts, you altered the deal, so I will alter your app

#113

Post by photomatt »

photomatt wrote: post #108

Howdy! There might be a misunderstanding: Anyone who has ever paid for Pocket Casts, even before Automattic acquired it, should not see ads. If you did, that's a bug and we'll fix it. Longer context: At Automattic, we take very seriously the sustainability of the promises we make to users of our products, including serving trillions of free requests to WP.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and many other services over the ye…

BTW, for builders, I think having some of these "golden ticket" accounts of your earliest adopters and promoters is a good strategy. The best marketing is word of mouth and seeing people love and use a product. We have some across Automattic where you can get a lifetime Jetpack or WP.com subscription for free for doing something awesome.

Re: Pocket Casts, you altered the deal, so I will alter your app

#114

Post by pavo-etc »

photomatt wrote: post #108

Howdy! There might be a misunderstanding: Anyone who has ever paid for Pocket Casts, even before Automattic acquired it, should not see ads. If you did, that's a bug and we'll fix it. Longer context: At Automattic, we take very seriously the sustainability of the promises we make to users of our products, including serving trillions of free requests to WP.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and many other services over the ye…

Hi Matt, I purchased the Android app in 2016. I never signed up for the paid syncing service, but never had ads within the app until this week. Is it the new policy that users who purchased the app but never paid for syncing will now have ads, or is this a bug?

Appreciate you being public in places like this. I sent a similar message to Pocketcasts support but received an AI that seems to disagree with your comment here.

Re: Pocket Casts, you altered the deal, so I will alter your app

#115

Post by Zagorath »

photomatt wrote: post #108

Howdy! There might be a misunderstanding: Anyone who has ever paid for Pocket Casts, even before Automattic acquired it, should not see ads. If you did, that's a bug and we'll fix it. Longer context: At Automattic, we take very seriously the sustainability of the promises we make to users of our products, including serving trillions of free requests to WP.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and many other services over the ye…

> Anyone who has ever paid for Pocket Casts, even before Automattic acquired it, should not see ads. If you did, that's a bug and we'll fix it.

I appreciate that. I hope you do. But I do not for one second believe the truth of it. If it were true, you wouldn't have been having customer service respond to people complaining about this by trying to hock a paid subscription. In both emails and in your forums.

This is not a bug in the technical sense. At best, it is choosing to walk back a policy after pushback.

> we have honored the legacy people who paid a one-time fee to Pocket Casts when they were a startup with basically what we call a "Champions" account

This is, as of now, factually untrue. Only those who paid for the web version get that. It should have been for everyone, and hopefully now you will apply it to everyone. But when you first announced paid subscriptions you were very clear: those who paid for the web version get premium for free. And even that was only done because the web version was being locked behind premium, and only after pushback for your first plan of giving them one year free.

For those of us who bought the app on iOS and Android, the promise of "pay once, use forever" was broken a long time ago. It is only because the features being granted by that paid version were not actually very appealing that it didn't become much of an issue before now.

By adding ads into a product people paid for (your customer service representatives are lying in your forums by saying it's a "free product"), you've crossed a line. The answer now is to make sure those of us who paid for your app (not once, but twice) get the full version of it, just like the advertising promised us when we bought it.

Re: Pocket Casts, you altered the deal, so I will alter your app

#116

Post by photomatt »

Zagorath wrote: post #115
photomatt wrote: post #108

Howdy! There might be a misunderstanding: Anyone who has ever paid for Pocket Casts, even before Automattic acquired it, should not see ads. If you did, that's a bug and we'll fix it. Longer context: At Automattic, we take very seriously the sustainability of the promises we make to users of our products, including serving trillions of free requests to WP.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and many other services over the ye…

> Anyone who has ever paid for Pocket Casts, even before Automattic acquired it, should not see ads. If you did, that's a bug and we'll fix it. I appreciate that. I hope you do. But I do not for one second believe the truth of it. If it were true, you wouldn't have been having customer service respond to people complaining about this by trying to hock a paid subscription. In both emails and in your forums. This is no…

The product has had several different owners over the years. I can't speak for all of them, but we're trying to do right by people now. If you send me your account info, I'm happy to upgrade it.

Re: Pocket Casts, you altered the deal, so I will alter your app

#117

Post by photomatt »

pavo-etc wrote: post #114
photomatt wrote: post #108

Howdy! There might be a misunderstanding: Anyone who has ever paid for Pocket Casts, even before Automattic acquired it, should not see ads. If you did, that's a bug and we'll fix it. Longer context: At Automattic, we take very seriously the sustainability of the promises we make to users of our products, including serving trillions of free requests to WP.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and many other services over the ye…

Hi Matt, I purchased the Android app in 2016. I never signed up for the paid syncing service, but never had ads within the app until this week. Is it the new policy that users who purchased the app but never paid for syncing will now have ads, or is this a bug? Appreciate you being public in places like this. I sent a similar message to Pocketcasts support but received an AI that seems to disagree with your comment h…

That might be a bug, thank you for purchasing back in 2016, we acquired it in 2018 and open sourced it in 2022. Send me your account info and I'll get it tagged properly.

Re: Pocket Casts, you altered the deal, so I will alter your app

#118

Post by wobfan »

mcv wrote: post #63
galaxy_gas wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having peek at the feature set I cannot imagine how this to cost more then handful of subscriber of revenue to run~ They do not host any media -- The volume of post searching fulltext is so small single PSQL instance can take over -- your listening progress is a single integer ...

Yeah, but they need money to pay for developers to enshittify the app.

This.

The app is virtually indifferent to what it looked like literally 4 years ago, apart from having some more rounded edges and some different animations. I know there will have been some required changes from Apple/Google, but it will not be a lot. Also, the sync is nice, but if the 5 MBs of metadata are so expensive why not change that to use GDrive/iCloud instead or allow to locally sync your progress?

The app and their service is not worth the extremely high cost of a mere podcast player which downloads data from external sources and plays it on my phone. I also paid for Pocket Casts Plus when it was ,99 or $2 (I don't remember) per month because I liked to upload my own podcast files, but since it was raised to idk 4$ I am not ready to pay anymore.

Re: Pocket Casts, you altered the deal, so I will alter your app

#119

Post by subarctic »

__rito__ wrote: post #46

Since we are talking about podcasts, if you are looking for a podcast app for Android, use Antenna Pod [0]. I use it every day. It's smooth, seamless, and FOSS. Note that I am just a user, and not otherwise linked with them. [0]: https://antennapod.org

AntennaPod is great, that's what I used to use before I switched to iOS and then I found pocket casts as the closest replacement
Post reply on HN