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

blog.matthewbrunelle.com

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

#141

Post by Zagorath »

photomatt wrote: post #116
Zagorath wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Hey, I genuinely appreciate that. I thought that this subscription was added under Automattic's watch, but as you say it has been a confusing process so I could very well be wrong.

I've already reached out to your customer service via email including my account info, so if you could use that to get my account upgraded, I would be very grateful. I received a pretty swift response to my first enquiry, but your customer service representative on that occasion pretty much said "lol sucks to be you, maybe you should upgrade?" I considered this an incredibly unacceptable response, and said as much, again pretty quickly (all three initial emails went through within half an hour). It has been days since my second email and I have not received a reply. If you are, as you say, trying to do right by people now, your customer service does not seem to be on the same page as you.

There are also dozens of users in the same situation as me who have spoken up on Pocket Cast's official forums, and elsewhere on social media. It may be worth getting the customer service representatives on your forums on the same page as you, because so far they have been giving the same "lol, just upgrade" type response that I got in email. And getting someone to extend the same offer to users making the complaint on Reddit and other social media.

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

#142

Post by derektank »

johanyc wrote: post #127
derektank wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is sort of incumbent upon you, as a business offering a lifetime membership, to properly invest some of that initial fee, such that the returns cover future operating costs. Many other companies work on this model. If the bank refused to return the money I loaned them, I would rightfully be very upset. I think it's similarly fair to be upset about a company revoking lifetime memberships. This particular si…

> as a business offering a lifetime membership > If the bank refused to return the money I loaned them, I would rightfully be very upset. Everyone who bought the app STILL have access to the app. All features they paid for are still available (except if you consider no ad a feature). The "correct" way to do it is change current app to classic and release a new app but that's quite cumbersome. I would like Apple or Go…

Which is why I said this specific case is a bit of a grey area (that and the fact that the lifetime membership was initially offered after moving the app to a freemium). I was speaking to general practice of offering lifetime memberships.

But yes, I do consider no ads to be a feature. My attention is valuable

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

#144

Post by eamon0989 »

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 originally paid for the Google Play version back in 2011 and the iOS version in 2012, but unfortunately I am also seeing adds now. Thank you for commenting publicly here, when I wrote to support I just got an automatic response. It seems that I am also affected by the bug. Would you please be able to fix the issue with my account? Thanks again.

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

#145

Post by kbelder »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #106
kbelder wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I know this will get downvotes. But I’m not wrong. Well, that statement was half wrong.

Rude: yes Value Added: no

It was rude, and I probably shouldn't have posted it on HN. It was intended to point out something though, and that was to call out the parent post.

In my opinion, at least, stating something and then adding "I am right!" is rude and disrespectful. It's implying that anybody that disagrees with you is not just wrong, but wrong to the degree that you cannot even allow for the possibility that you are mistaken, or that conversation is pointless. That's why I was rude back.

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

#146

Post by goldcd »

photomatt wrote: post #116
Zagorath wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Please don't do it like this.

It wasn't a bug. Please, just say it. Give me closure. It'll be good for your karma. The adverts have been running all month and the 1* reviews on the app store and your forums would have made you aware of this 'defect'. Forum responses were initially to tell us to upgrade - and then they went silent. I presume you had some internal meetings.

Resolving this wouldn't have been hard, as due to it being open-sourced, we can see there's a debug flag to turn the adverts on and off: https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/podcasts-you-altered-the-de...

The Verge story came out on the 24th, and on the 25th suddenly the adverts vanished (on both beta and production channels simultaneously). Imagine me raising my eyebrow.

Unlike some of my fellow previously-paid users, I'd said I was OK with paying you more money. The app's lasted longer than most, I've used it nearly every day, and I want to make sure the maintainers get paid and you can keep the lights on. I think it's still the only app where I've raised a ticket to ask how to donate more money.

What's sent us all the the barricades though, is the tone-deaf way this was done - and it's continuing to happen. The adverts are gone, but I'm not feeling happy. This feels like remission at best. I'm suspecting you're not feeling deliriously cheerful over what the last month has achieved either.

My constructive thoughts are: 1) £40 is too much to pay each year for a podcast app. Nothing will work at this price. Look at Antennapod and justify anything you're charging for - it's what any your new users will be doing. 2) For people who paid to turn off the adverts forever, they need to have a way to have their adverts turned off turned off - so they'll need to be differentiated from the new users. 3) This doesn't mean I (and I assume others) don't want to pay you money though. Give me a way. Maybe every month, or 1000 minutes of playback just pop-up a "I hope your enjoying us, have you got a spare $10" message"? And if I click the little X, that message should instantly vanish/snooze. Annoyingly, this might have worked better before you'd torched the goodwill.

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

#147

Post by brokenmachine »

johanyc wrote: post #128
Zagorath wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't warn us ahead of time that there would be ads. The patch notes didn't even mention the ads! Shifty Jelly used to have legendary patch notes, but it's been a long time since that was true. And since app stores don't actually let you downgrade to a previous version, your comment is simply untrue.

I think apple and google should allow us to disable updates to certain apps.

I have updates disabled on my Android phone. Every couple of weeks I go through and update what I want.

But yes I don't think you can disable updates only for particular apps.

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

#148

Post by Zagorath »

photomatt wrote: post #116
Zagorath wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well, this morning I noticed my account had been set to a premium one and the ads were gone. Thanks for getting the right thing done here.

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

#149

Post by hbn »

grimblee wrote: post #97

I worked for a company that did audio streaming and the problem is that cloud providers' bandwidth is expensive af, only option is to own your machines in a datacenter and negotiate bandwidth prices with an ISP

I'm almost a week late but they don't stream audio from their servers. Your device pulls directly from RSS feeds which individual podcasts are in charge of maintaining and paying hosting costs.

They do have a few online features they run, like syncing your subscribed podcasts and listening progress and whatnot, and I think they have their own index of RSS links for searching, but nothing compared to streaming audio.

Anyway, as of today they backtracked on showing ads to people who purchased the app before it went free. I guess they're claiming it was a bug, which I don't really believe but I don't care as long as they undid making the app ugly.

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

#150

Post by 3bZ7nJ-XU_x8 »

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…

sick thx
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