Yeah, they aren't iheartradio or anything.
NPR also has an excellent website where you can listen to their content on mobile devices.
This app is a third way to access their content. It doesn’t make sense for everyone (if someone only listens to one NPR show – for example Planet Money – and also a lot of other, similar audio content from other sources I would recommend getting a podcast app they like; if someone only occasionally listens to NPR – for example when someone recommends them something specific – I would recommend just visiting the website), but it can make sense for certain people.
So no, NPR very much does not assume that you only want to listen to NPR. That’s a completely incorrect assumption on your part.
If you want everything get a podcast app. NPR has nothing against podcasts and you can get the right feeds from them. If NPR would want to discontinue offering podcast feeds you would have a point … but as it stands right now you just sound incoherent and uninformed.
Edit: Ok, there are several excellent podcast apps on iOS. No idea about Android, could be royally broken there, but I don’t really care. That platform is broken, anyway. More broken than iOS at least. Podcast apps on iOS are a healthy category with lots of competition and radically different approaches – so there should be an at least acceptable app for everyone.
I can't comment on this new app yet but I'm a near daily user of the regular NPR app (which I think is officially called "NPR news"). It's way better than any generic radio app I've tried.
Besides listening to the individual local stations, you can also get the latest news (the ~4-minute hourly blurb), can create playlists of entire shows (without the interludes, i.e. just the content), and built-in news articles (for reading, not listening). I've even used the local NPR station finder to help me tune an analog radio when in a new city where I'm not familiar with the local stations.
It'd take quite a bit of agreement on content licensing and data formats to have anything like that be as usable as the NPR app across multiple content providers.
> Seriously - why does everyone assume that if I want to listen to e.g. NPR, I only want to listen to NPR?
Well some of us do :D
Why? So I can escape the soul-crushing drudgery of Car Talk and Prairie Home Companion. They're good shows, but they're essentially the same show, repeated thousands of times. And no matter where I am, they seem to be what's on the local NPR station.
So I already have apps (or streams in the Radium app) for the CBC, BBC, Deutsche Welle, etc. If this new NPR app lets me listen without needing to constantly fiddle with my phone and select stories, I'll use it a lot.
If you want live radio, you can stream from mobile Safari. I'm not sure about others. Music, of course, has always been available. Since before smart phones, even.
In short, you don't need these apps any more than most other apps.
Also, why do all these damned apps have ridiculous access requirements ? In recent weeks I have been dismayed to find that HBO Go and Sonos apps both require access to all of my media files (android app) in order to be installed.
I'll bet that's not uncommon. Presumably it's just lazy development by people that don't know the finer points of the SDKs, etc., but it's pretty ridiculous what a lot of these apps (that, as the parent points out, aren't really necessary anyway[1]) require.
[1] HBO Go does not need to be an app, as demonstrated by the fact that I use it in my browser (OSX) every day.
Yeah, I suppose they don't want to be too granular and overwhelm users with a ton of permissions but, to your point, it actually makes things worse. Overly broad categories lead to suspicion.
It's funny though, because for years, we all downloaded/installed desktop apps which had free reign on our machines. I suppose the facts that apps can come from untrusted sources, are thought to have more specific functions, are installed on very personal devices, and were born in an age where privacy concerns/fraud/malware/connectedness were common, all have something to do with it.
I wonder, though, if our concern is mostly stimulated by the fact that we're now being presented with permission choices in the first place. As, now, even "trusted" brands like HBO can earn our suspicion if we think their apps are being greedy with permission requests.
Incidentally, I feel like as smartphones become more ubiquitous and embedded into the rest of our lives, we'll start to see apps that have a much more simple purpose. After all, since Siri isn't programmable by app developers, the fastest way to listen to NPR is now downloading the app, holding your home button, and saying "Open NPR One". Perhaps the app could be designed so that it immediately begins streaming when you open it, that way you can just tell your phone something and suddenly you're listening to the radio.
All of this audio streaming is on a consistent platform, it's mostly Icecast or SHOUTcast servers doing the actual streaming. Theoretically, one could build a directory of radio stations like Nullsoft did with SHOUTcast, but the main issue is the platform has never been created by a company whose SOLE PURPOSE is to index and catalog current radio stations. Until we get that, I don't think you're gonna see a platform improvement any time soon.
They're adding a new way to access their media because it does things that the generic clients can't. That doesn't mean the other distribution channels are going away.
Pocket Casts is awesome but there have been times when I really wanted a web version. Lately though I use Chromecast from the app when I'd normally want the PC to play the track.
The question is whether the product is used frequently enough and can actually make use of a custom interface, compared to whether a more generic app would actually provide value. If I would use the generic app to listen to NPR 95% of the time, then it probably makes more sense to dedicate the app to NPR and just use a web browser for the other 5%.
Reversing XKCD, it's probably better to think of apps as slightly heavy and custom websites. There's really not much loss in having lots more apps so long as they're lighweight. Throw them all into a folder on your homescreen.
Is this stopping you from getting NPR content in a regular podcatcher? Do they have an annoying "app-wall" forcing you to install the app when you visit npr.org on a mobile device? No? Then I don't see what the problem is.
We can't fault a company (or non-profit organization for that matter) for following their optimal strategy, can we? Sure it's an annoyance to the end-user because it fragments the market, but that's where there's an opportunity for a disruption!
If everything were on iTunes, would that make you happy? It's clear to me that the cut that Apple is taking (for the benefit of inclusion on their "content-agnostic platform") is something that is untenable for NPR and many other similar content producers out there.
Why would I cooperate with a central platform, when once its achieves market dominance, it uses that position to dictate my profit margins?
Nobody "owns" RSS for example.
This is the biggest problem with audio apps these days - you get everyone trying to make a similar thing, and because they're all competing they all try and lock each other out of their own products.
What would be so much better is a content-agnostic platform, that'll let you play whatever the hell you want - whether it's music, talk radio, podcasts, whatever.
Seriously - why does everyone assume that if I want to listen to e.g. NPR, I only want to listen to NPR?