141–150 of 204 posts
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Pocket Casts never tracked anything. Why is it now okay to start tracking me? Does NPR do something better than anything other large organization?
You do not know that they are going to start tracking you.
I'm so glad to see the team behind Pocket Casts find success. It's one app I've never been disappointed with and supported right from the beginning. The paramount quality of a good app is how easily it gets out of the way and lets you enjoy the content. Pocket Casts has done a spectacular job at that.
When I recommend it to people I always describe it as "the only good app".
The Apple podcast app has gotten continuously worse over the past few years, I'm excited to see that 3rd parties are picking up the slack, but I'm still pretty disappointed that Apple has neglected one of the most important aspect of the phone (for me, anyway).
Try Overcast, I’m a big fan. I finally gave up on the Apple app years ago after it was unable to sync my place for the 1200th time. Never had that issue with Overcast.
> Pocket Casts will operate as a joint venture, with founders Philip Simpson and Russell Ivanovic in leadership roles and the existing staff and developer team remaining in place. > “We turned them down because the unique thing about this opportunity is the mission driven nature of these organizations. They want what’s best for the podcasting space, they want to build open systems that everyone can use.” The initial…
"What's best for the podcasting space" is more scary than it sounds tho imo. A lot of business people would consider web-like analytics "the best for the podcasting space", even though it would be horrible for podcast listeners.
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> What they want is the usage data like where they pause, where they skip, etc. That's exactly what I don't want > These data were traditionally not available to podcast publishers because podcast is really just an mp3 file uploaded to some server. Good. Long may it remain so.
I don't want them to have individual data, but I'm fine with them having anonymized statistics. Knowing what people are doing with things you make is such a valuable tool for making it better.
I've been frustrated with many free podcast apps so I paid for Pocket Casts and I've been happy since. I think it's a smart move by NPR et al. What they want is the usage data like where they pause, where they skip, etc. These data were traditionally not available to podcast publishers because podcast is really just an mp3 file uploaded to some server. NPR has the NPR One app but I guess not enough people are using i…
You should give AntennaPod a chance, very lightweight and allows for new podcasts to be added. It is open source and has is actively developed. Additionally you won't have any new requirement to create a new account or pull analytics from your listening habits as you mentioned towards the end.
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Find me an open source app that I can use on iOS, Android & the web, and sync my subscriptions and play state between them, and I’ll be glad to have a look. Until then I am very happy to pay fine developers such as these a tiny sum for their craft.
Antennapod and gpodder will work for the web and Android, I don't own an iOS device so I don't know of any solutions for that platform unfortunately. To add to that, there are issues between the GPL and the Apple App Store ToS so open source apps on that platform are at a disadvantage as a result.
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Try Overcast, I’m a big fan. I finally gave up on the Apple app years ago after it was unable to sync my place for the 1200th time. Never had that issue with Overcast.
The question with Overcast, is whether it will be able to compete in the open market with Marco's almost quixotic desire to avoid any form of tracking whatsoever. He won't even track stop/start/listen actions, and now he's eliminating tracking pixels ( https://marco.org/2018/04/27/overcast42 ) - all very admirable, but by foregoing all the obvious revenue opportunities, will he be able to make it up by attracting a l…
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It's that vanishing breed: designed well but not overdesigned, technically solid, no hidden agenda or ecosystem to push, all for a fair upfront price. Hope they don't mess it up.
I've never seen the appeal of Pocket Casts or these almost-a-service podcast apps. I've been using Antennapod for over a year now and it a great podcast app and does a lot of stuff the paid ones won't even do, including syncing what episodes I've listened to to gpodder.net, searching iTunes and other websites and just having an easy to use, simple UI. It's just a shame that these FOSS apps which have much lower overh…
When I was using Downcast on iOS refreshing all feeds took ages and a lot of traffic (some feeds with a lot of episodes can be more than 500 kB, that adds up when you're subscribed to 50 feeds) and since the refresh wasn't even threaded all it took was a single slow server to block the whole refresh.
Now in Overcast (which does server-side crawling) the refresh is instant and I can even get immediate notifications about new episodes.
Is there any chance this will lead to being able to listen to old TAL episodes via RSS? It's kinda strange that TAL is buying a podcast player company but they don't want us to listen to their podcasts...