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The audacity of Apple Podcasts

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Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#221

Post by b0tch7 »

neilparikh wrote: post #186
ted_bunny wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why's that?

I'm guessing their point was that in many other countries (ex. Canada), tap to pay is pretty much universally supported for many years, to the point where I'm surprised when a merchant doesn't have it. The majority of my transactions in Canada were tap to pay as far back as 2018. It's also worth noting that Apple Pay isn't its own protocol, it just does the same thing as the tap to pay built into cards, so not at all…

Yep, same here in Australia. I never leave the house with more than my phone and I expect to tap & pay for absolutely everything. Even have cardless cash thru my bank's atm. and a digital license.

Visiting America feels like travelling back in time in this regard

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#222

Post by unosama »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #208
MBCook wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And that was basically Apple's strategy to begin with. That user can say he doesn't experience it in his friend group but its been well documented and accepted at this point [1], especially among teenagers.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#223

Post by ryanbrunner »

SllX wrote: post #136
bastawhiz wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And that sucks for them, but it is also what the service is . It’s a cheap way to funnel people through the Podcasts app and generate more services revenue for Apple; you can’t even really call it a podcast host by any reasonable definition. Spotify’s service is about funneling people through the Spotify app to sell subscriptions and ads. YouTube’s service is basically the same. It’s a legitimate service that they si…

On the topic of subscriptions, Spotify does have an open ecosystem where purchasing a subscription through Spotify isn't necessarily purchasing a subscription through Anchor. With Apple, the only subscription you're buying is Apple's subscriptions and other platforms are completely locked out.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#224

Post by ryanbrunner »

jackson1442 wrote: post #60
xoa wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're charging a subscription fee then it makes sense that the podcast lives in a walled DRM'ed garden No, it absolutely does not. In the same way it doesn't make any sense to have DRM on music or anything else I pay for. I'm a paying customer, why should my experience and the product I'm paying for literally be worse then the people who pirate it? This thinking is straight out of the 90s/00s RIAA playbook that…

> In the same way it doesn't make any sense to have DRM on music or anything else I pay for You're not buying it, you're renting it. A subscription is a monthly payment, you will no longer have paid access once you choose to stop paying for it. It has DRM for the same reason Spotify, Apple Music, et al. use DRM.

In the context of podcasts where there's a regular stream of episodes, it's perfectly reasonable to say that you have DRM free access to any episode that occurred prior to your subscription ending. It's how every single other podcast subscription service works.

(full disclaimer: I run engineering for a competitive podcast subscription service, Supercast)

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#225

Post by ryanbrunner »

moogleii wrote: post #22
dabernathy89 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This service doesn't give podcast hosts a way to retrieve their own material. It doesn't inform them that they'll be completely locked into Apple's service. If creators were aware of this upfront, then sure, I'd say "just don't use it" too.

I'm a bit out of the loop but wouldn't hosts have the original source material that they uploaded? Similar to how users have the source images/videos to whatever they upload to TikTok and Instagram? I suspect neither offer an export either. Additionally, the author complains that an Apple Podcast user has to go through the app (and all its restrictions), but again, not that different from Instagram posts. As a user,…

In addition to the audio, there's also show specific metadata like episode names, summaries, and show notes, which can get pretty comprehensive. It would maybe be a smart idea to have a copy of those outside of your hosting provider, but that's not common.

The bigger thing though is less about the data and more about your listeners. If you move to another podcast host, it's obviously important that your existing listeners move with you, and every public podcast host I'm aware of will happily redirect your feeds (as mentioned in the article)

With Apple you have to ask people to move, and asking people to take an action is necessarily going to involve a lot of churn and confusion.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#226

Post by ryanbrunner »

dkonofalski wrote: post #90
bastawhiz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. > wouldn't hosts have the original source material that they uploaded As far as I'm aware, Apple never resurfaces the audio after it's uploaded, even in your dashboard. Even if they did, making someone manually download and reupload every asset for potentially hundreds of episodes is sadistic. Moreover, you physically can't leave, because your listeners won't follow you to your new hosting service. > The…

>Moreover, you physically can't leave, because your listeners won't follow you to your new hosting service. This is patently not true. I've had to do this after a podcast host had an outage and our followers moved over because we posted on social that there was a new feed. Joe Rogan's followers moved to Spotify just fine after he removed all other traces of his show. It's not great but you're literally getting what y…

I'm assuming it wasn't anywhere close to 100% though, which a simple 301 redirect would give you.

Every podcast host I'm aware of would be happy to do that for you.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#227

Post by maven29 »

philliphaydon wrote: post #219
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…

> but people need to understand the future they are buying into with Apple When Google or MS or someone else builds a better experience then we can move. Google shuts things down like there’s no tomorrow. MS can’t release a product beyond 3 countries. No one makes headphones like Apple. You can argue till you’re blue in the face that all the sound quality of every other brand is better. But I’m so tired of having to…

I realize that it was just an example but newer bluetooth TWS chipsets can do multi-point pairing just fine. Also, Google's Fast Pair API is currently being expanded beyond just pairing headphones. They aim for more than just surface-level UX.

I doubt apps can stay on the playstore after asking for card details in a form. Google wants their cut too

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#228

Post by ryanbrunner »

bastawhiz wrote: post #9
mikece wrote: post #3

"Under the hood, Apple stopped having each device request a copy of RSS feeds." Yes, because this was creating DDoS levels of traffic to podcast hosting providers. Now Apple simply pings madly away at all known podcast RSS feeds and updates clients when there is a new episode. What would be far greener -- and efficient! -- would be for them to get on board with PodPing[1] to not only deliver feed updates much faster…

> creating DDoS levels of traffic Author here. This has never been a problem, both in terms of volume and cost. I host ~0.25% (maybe more? I haven't checked recently) of all podcasts listed on Apple and up to a few years ago, I wasn't even using a CDN. Two Heroku dynos at ~$250/mo (25 customer subscriptions today) running a Python back-end with no caching at all was able to keep up without trouble. In fact, the only…

I agree with this. We actually dynamically render RSS feeds (we have some personalization options) and while we've had to optimize it here and there, it doesn't even register as a real cost or problem (streaming MP3 files to listeners is the real cost of hosting podcasts).

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#229

Post by paulcole »

slenk wrote: post #212
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I just call them sheeple

Are you the person who made up that insult? Or do you just go along with all the other people who use it?

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#230

Post by ryanbrunner »

unosama wrote: post #213

I'm sorry but you'd have to be a fool to host your podcast on Apple.... I'm shocked that Apple's podcast hosting ever had an option to export the data. I've never used Apple podcasting services for listening because it always seemed like a huge pain designed to lock you in. There's plenty of free Podcast apps out there. And IMHO -- if it doesn't have an RSS feed it's not a podcast. (Looking at you, Patreon Substack S…

Patreon and Substack do have RSS feeds available.
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