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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

#21

Post by muppetman »

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…

Because we paid to not have to put up with this garbage. There's so many better ways to do this - look at nzb360 - https://nzb360.com/

They added a new/better interface you have to pay money to unlock. When they add new features/services you now have to pay to unlock. What you paid for originally, still yours. Want to get access to the new stuff? You can either pay a subscription for "everything" or pay one-time-unlocks for features.

Then I look at serviecs like lichess where they just operate 100% on donations and users helping by adding their devices into the pool of compute for analysis.

"Shove ads in" is the low, easiest, tackiest way to "annoy" your users into paying. Those that already paid once are annoyed the goalposts have changed. Make the app worth paying an upgrade for, don't just go "well it's still shit but now there's ads unless you pay!"

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

#22

Post by tantalor »

galaxy_gas wrote: post #18
rbits wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they have their own podcast index that you can search through. They also sync your listening progress to the cloud. But with PocketCasts Plus being $66 AUD/year, surely those subscriptions are enough to cover the costs. I used to subscribe to PocketCasts Plus, but I stopped when they raised the price. It's so expensive.

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 ...

Reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

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

#23

Post by rmunn »

This has nothing to do with the content of the article, but is anyone else annoyed by that link style, or is it only me? To me, the link style where the underline partially overlaps the baseline of the text (not just characters with descenders like g and q and y, but the actual baseline so that it overlaps nearly all characters) harms readability.

I'm also not a huge fan of the way hovering over the link turns it into a highlight on the word, but that's not a huge readability issue because the highlight covers the entire character. But having the non-hovered link underline be fat, so that it partially overlaps the baseline of the characters, means that those characters are superimposed on two different backgrounds, pale blue and pale red, and that harms readability.

This site isn't the only one that does this, or I might not be complaining. It's a style that seems to be popular, and I really don't know why. It's a bad idea and people should stop doing it.

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

#24

Post by climb_stealth »

rmunn wrote: post #23

This has nothing to do with the content of the article, but is anyone else annoyed by that link style, or is it only me? To me, the link style where the underline partially overlaps the baseline of the text (not just characters with descenders like g and q and y, but the actual baseline so that it overlaps nearly all characters) harms readability. I'm also not a huge fan of the way hovering over the link turns it int…

Agreed. I would not have realised they were links if I had not read your comment.

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

#25

Post by galaxy_gas »

tantalor wrote: post #22
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 ...

Reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

at least have cost of storing the media that Dropbox need pay. In this case there is none of that.

[[ I do understand there is a small distinction here, in that the Dropbox reference is for a user that will self host the storage server, but in the context of this message I refer to the SAAS host or owner of Pocket Casts I cannot imagine to be losing 800k a year even at AWS pricing given what the app does or something is written very wrong ... ]]

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

#26

Post by simultsop »

rmunn wrote: post #17
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…

If you don't honor contracts, then you should go out of business, because nobody will trust you (if they're wise, though there are always some people/companies who will be foolish). If you make a contract that involves you receiving a one-time fee for something that will cost you far more than that fee, then you will eventually go out of business for being stupid. Yes, there are hosting costs and maintenance costs. S…

If people/companies want to support a thing they think should exist, it is their sacrifice to keep it alive. I don't think as them being stupid.

For the concerns of contracts, you are not alone on the suffering side. Alltogether humanity elevated tolerance to this level, this is not a surprise.

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

#27

Post by WD-42 »

I switched to Pocket Casts because the official Apple app changed their UI to a recommendation feed instead of a plain timeline. I only listen to podcasts on a single device, anyone have suggestions for alternatives? I don't mind paying a one time fee, but this should really be a mostly (completely?) cloud-less app.

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

#28

Post by wahnfrieden »

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…

You will renege on a contract if it’s inconvenient to honor it? Good to know.

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

#30

Post by bigfishrunning »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #5

> You were a pay-once app. Released in 2011, pay once each for Android, iOS, and Web and keep for life. You know. I approve the pushback on enshitification. But there’s something weird about righteous fury over an app which literally costs money to run didn’t provide free updates for literally decades on what probably cost like $5. I dunno. It just kinda rubs me the wrong way.

If they just didn't update it, that would have been fantastic. It's the updates that added ads which are the problem.
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