Re:The absolute audacity of Apple Podcasts
by scarface74 on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @07:37PM
(#34526294)
> Apple's end game is vertical integration, it's "lock-in" on steroids. When they own every product or service in the stack, they can tune one product (like podcasts) to serve the purposes of another, even when it appears to hurt a product and it's users individually, because it benefits Apple as a whole.
This is demonstrable not true. From the time that iTunes first introduced podcast support in iTunes back in 2004 until today, you host your RSS feed on your own site and iTunes indexes your RSS feed. But you still host your own audio that gets served off of your own site.
Not only that, Apple has had a public documented API that doesn’t need any keys that you can use to basically get any information from the index since 2006.
Third party podcast apps use the API.
If your podcast isn’t listed on iTunes, you can still subscribe to the RSS feed of the podcast directly if you know the url.
If you publish a URL on your website, by default it will open in the podcast app.
This is much different than the podcast in name only monstrosity that Spotify has
On the other hand, the Apple podcast app has always sucked and I use Overcast.
Yes you can pretty easily have paid podcasts outside of Apple .
To the first approximation, no one is dumb enough to use Apple’s paid podcast offering and uses a third party one or roll their own with dedicated urls because they realize the number of third party clients available and they have no relationship with the customer.
This is demonstrable not true. From the time that iTunes first introduced podcast support in iTunes back in 2004 until today, you host your RSS feed on your own site and iTunes indexes your RSS feed. But you still host your own audio that gets served off of your own site.
Not only that, Apple has had a public documented API that doesn’t need any keys that you can use to basically get any information from the index since 2006.
Third party podcast apps use the API.
If your podcast isn’t listed on iTunes, you can still subscribe to the RSS feed of the podcast directly if you know the url.
If you publish a URL on your website, by default it will open in the podcast app.
This is much different than the podcast in name only monstrosity that Spotify has
On the other hand, the Apple podcast app has always sucked and I use Overcast.
Yes you can pretty easily have paid podcasts outside of Apple .
To the first approximation, no one is dumb enough to use Apple’s paid podcast offering and uses a third party one or roll their own with dedicated urls because they realize the number of third party clients available and they have no relationship with the customer.