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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

#31

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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 you don't honor contracts, then you should go out of business

We're talking about Automattic. It's virtually their business model.

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

#33

Post by toofy »

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…

it seems to me that we desperately need to get back to a place where a business is held to their word.

we have come to a place where corporations are calling limited “unlimited” and outright just lying to people.

i have seen people unironically defend this as “well if they don’t lie, then how do you expect them to sell their product?” again, people have said this entirely unironically.

i think it’s far more reasonable to expect a company to be held to their contracts and agreements. normal people certainly are.

i’ll never understand how we got to a place where so many corporations can say with a straight face “we deserve to make money in any way possible and it’s unfair for you to hold us to any kind of responsibility for our own actions”

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

#34

Post by mrheosuper »

toofy wrote: post #33
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…

it seems to me that we desperately need to get back to a place where a business is held to their word. we have come to a place where corporations are calling limited “unlimited” and outright just lying to people. i have seen people unironically defend this as “well if they don’t lie, then how do you expect them to sell their product?” again, people have said this entirely unironically. i think it’s far more reasonabl…

Back in the day, Pepsi had an ads that claim you can win a Jet fighter if you do xxx. A guy did xxx and tried to get the Jet, but of course he couldn't and sue them. The court let Pepsi win.

So, "a place where a business is held to their word" has never been existed.

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

#35

Post by baby_souffle »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #31
rmunn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 you don't honor contracts, then you should go out of business We're talking about Automattic. It's virtually their business model.

I don't think they owned Pocket casts all the way back then...

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

#36

Post by ghqst »

WD-42 wrote: post #27

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.

A lot of podcast apps have a server for crawling the RSS feeds for you.

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

#37

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

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…

Well, does anyone actually have a copy of the contract from 14 years ago? Usually there are clauses hedging against this kind of thing.

Example: I recently wrote the T&S for my Finnish dictionary app (still working on it), and I make it clear in advance that the license was a one time fee for perpetual use for that major version. [1]

I can do this because the app is almost entirely offline, and because for the parts that are, smart cloud infra decisions means my recurring infra costs are low. If I add in features which imply a bespoke server down the line, of course that would probably be a major version upgrade - and a change in the pricing model to boot. But I'd still keep the old v1 stuff up for the lifers.

[1]: https://taskusanakirja.com/terms-of-service/#91-pricing-and-...

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

#38

Post by mgrandl »

donatj wrote: post #32

$800,000 net loss? What in the mismanaged business world are you even doing? I've built feed aggregators in the past... I just can't understand where the costs ar. Are they rehosting all the audio and that's bandwidth costs? Even then it seemed high.

They are definitely not rehosting. I can tell that certain podcasts are streaming with much more latency compared to others hosted closer to where I live.

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

#39

Post by JumpCrisscross »

derektank wrote: post #14
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…

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…

> 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

We may need a law that regulates "lifetime" purchases. One part is standardised disclosure. The other is putting fees into a trust.

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

#40

Post by scarface_74 »

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 version.

It’s available for the iPhones, iPads and the web with full CarPlay support and it syncs podcasts to the Apple Watch.

He did learn from his mistake of making Instapaper a one time payment and sold it.

For those who don’t know, he was the cofounder of Tumblr.

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