On many podcasts now, this is increasingly obfuscated or hidden:

- There is no dedicated podcast homepage, only a set of service links (Spotify, Itunes, etc.).

- RSS itself may not be provided.

- Audio is hidden inside Javascript requests.

I do listen to many podcasts by going to a page and finding the single-episode download link,and playing that directly via mpv or other CLI tools. Success rate is falling, seems to be ~75% or so anecdotally. Often I'll curl the page, explode elements to one per line, and grep for '\.mp3' references. Even that fails often.

And yes, I use dedicated podcast apps to subscribe specifically, but I don't want or need to subscribe to every last podcast just to listen to a single episode.

Open standards promote interoperability. Profit comes by building walls and moats.

Profit seems to be winning.

One can browse the web by telnet and issuing HTTP requests directly or sending emails with `mail`, but its usually a bit smoother of an experience using a web browser or email client.

I use a podcast app to favorite the RSS feeds of podcasts and other content. It then keeps track of which entries are new, can automatically download those new ones, and keep track of what I've already listened to. It makes it a lot easier than manually looking at the RSS feeds and downloading the files by hand.

There lots of apps that are great at helping you find and organize them, pretty much automatically, compared to manually tracking all that.

As all the successful technology, convenience.

What SSLy said. For the same reason I have a single app which plays all my shoutcast streams with one button click, the same reason I don't type SMTP/IMAP commands manually or read RSS feed xml with in vim. These are not "Dedicated apps", they are generically useful software applications. Spotify is a Dedicated App.