The audacity of Apple Podcasts

&gt; 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.<p>I&#x27;m gona keep shouting this from the rooftops and maybe it will eventually sink in for some people:<p>Apple&#x27;s end game is vertical integration, it&#x27;s &quot;lock-in&quot; 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&#x27;s users individually, because it benefits Apple as a whole.<p>I get that Apple stuff is generally a nice experience and there is genuinely lots of cool technology, but people need to understand the future they are buying into with Apple. The deeper someone gets, the more painful it&#x27;s going to be when that table flip moment comes, because that table has the weight of the whole Apple ecosystem holding it down - and so people will unconsciously endure much pain before doing so (lest they lose access to their podcasts); If that table flip moment comes with a competitor for an _individual_ service like this one, it&#x27;s going to be a tiny inconvenience, and so users will endure less, and the product owner has more market pressure to provide a good service as the friction to change is low.<p>Those passionate about Apple will argue with individual counter examples, but the core issue is the broader strategy that does not have user interests at heart. It&#x27;s honestly heartbreaking as someone who grew up with and loved Apple computers, they hung onto the concept of holism from the 80s in making the <i>whole</i> computer and it has produced some excellent machines. But now the same strategy is being twisted into something that actively works against the user instead.

&gt; <i>You could sign up to allow Apple to host your show and its audio (for a cool $20&#x2F;year). In exchange, you could charge a subscription fee to your listeners... If you host your show with Apple, the only listeners you can have are folks with the Apple Podcasts app... The audio will be protected with DRM.</i><p>The author presents this as &quot;audacity&quot; and bad... but doesn&#x27;t it make perfect sense? If you&#x27;re charging a subscription fee then it makes sense that the podcast lives in a walled DRM&#x27;ed garden. Also, if Apple is hosting it for nearly free ($20&#x2F;year is nothing), why would you expect Apple to make it available to competing podcast apps? If you post something on TikTok it doesn&#x27;t show up on people&#x27;s Facebook feeds.<p>Apple isn&#x27;t taking away self-hosted RSS podcast feeds. It&#x27;s presenting a separate paid subscription experience within its Podcasts app. No &quot;audacity&quot; about it. If you don&#x27;t want that as a creator, don&#x27;t use it.

I listen to hours of podcasts each day (dog-walking, walking, running etc) and am fully immersed in the Apple ecosystem, but the Apple Podcast app is a turkey. Shallow feature set, bugs that never get fixed and an environment that doesn&#x27;t evolve. It&#x27;s software that can only be developed by a company that hates its user base. Ugh. I&#x27;ve been using and loving iCatcher for years [1].<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;joeisanerd.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;joeisanerd.com</a>

&quot;Under the hood, Apple stopped having each device request a copy of RSS feeds.&quot;<p>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 but to use a tiny fraction of the resources they are using now to get it done.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcasting20.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;podping" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcasting20.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;podping</a>

I remember having an iMac with 3TB hard disk on which I stored all my CDs ripped in an lossless format. iTunes had an option to stream the library to local network and since this iMac was on 24&#x2F;7, this was a perfect solution for me to have an audio-NAS and also kind-of remote streaming when I was connecting via VPN to my home network.<p>Than there came Tim Cook&#x27;s &quot;upgrades&quot;: OS X was renamed to macOS, iTunes to Music, and Apple blocked LAN-related options which came with purchased devices.<p>At the same time Apple asked me to pay for the same functionality and their ecosystem&#x27;s attractiveness started getting shittier. Since then, with similar actions, Tim Cook switched increasingly more of my activities from Apple&#x27;s increasingly-hostile and toxic ecosystem to almost anywhere else.

The best part is how Apple Podcasts had a 1.x star rating in the App Store so they gamed the system in a way that would get any other app kicked off - they prompted people for reviews making them think they were rating specific podcasts and not the app<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;19&#x2F;22791968&#x2F;apple-podcasts-star-score-review-prompt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;19&#x2F;22791968&#x2F;apple-podcasts-...</a>

Reading this, I get the impression that someone at Apple tried to do the market capture playbook tactics (churn prevention, competitor lockout, first-party-favoritism) in an open world (podcasts). Obviously it doesn’t work, while eroding the underlying ecosystem.<p>The smart move by Apple is to keep podcasts open, keep being the de facto provider, don’t bother making money from it now, and use it as a foot-in-the-door as the web evolves for future plays.

I have produced a weekly podcast about amateur radio since 2011. It was hosted on S3 since I started because it became immediately clear that any other option would put my content under the control of someone who did not have my best interest at heart.<p>Today it&#x27;s mirrored across dozens of aggregators, converted to eBooks, converted to Morse Code, uploaded to YouTube, posted on social media, emailed to listeners and included in magazine articles and news broadcasts across the globe. All the content is still under my direct control.<p>As for making money, not so much. I&#x27;d have to check my accounts for an exact number, but $500 over that time is about right.<p>It highlights to me that someone is making money from podcasting, but that someone is not me and I doubt it&#x27;s any different for the vast majority of podcast producers.<p>I think as a society we need to figure out how content creators can be remunerated for their efforts and not perpetuate the current model where &quot;facilitators&quot; in all their varied guises make all the money.

I&#x27;ve noticed Apple is destroying their brand equity in so many ways just to squeeze out as much from their customers as possible. Having advertisements in my iPhone settings just shows how petty they are willing to be. I used to use their TV app but now it&#x27;s first purpose is an advertisement for Apple TV+.

I stopped using Apple Podcasts because 1) they killed connectivity to my iPod; 2) the app is extremely buggy; and 3) the app is totally unusable.

Spotify podcasts don&#x27;t have RSS feeds either. And have massively expanded their podcast program over the past few years, such that they know serve more podcast listeners than Apple.<p>But this is the play several big players are involved in make to try to convert podcasts into walled gardens.<p>The OP is really sniping around the edges of a major thing that&#x27;s going on, which Apple is actually playing catch-up on.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mattstoller.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;will-spotify-ruin-podcasting" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mattstoller.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;will-spotify-ruin-podcast...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fair.org&#x2F;home&#x2F;the-new-podcast-oligopoly&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fair.org&#x2F;home&#x2F;the-new-podcast-oligopoly&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2022&#x2F;feb&#x2F;23&#x2F;techscape-spotify-podcasts-joe-rogan" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2022&#x2F;feb&#x2F;23&#x2F;techscape...</a>

&gt; Apple is letting people pay $20&#x2F;year for the privilege of being locked into an ecosystem run by people who think that they’re the best thing since the transistor radio. They make it virtually impossible to leave, even when they offer no meaningful value-add to folks who have outgrown their meager offering.<p>Sounds like a lot of what Apple does!

&gt; Under the hood, Apple stopped having each device request a copy of RSS feeds. Instead, Apple’s servers would request the feed once, and the Apple Podcasts app on your Mac or iOS device would ping Apple for episode updates. On one hand, you could argue this is a good thing (more anonymous if you trust Apple, significant bandwidth savings for hosting services). On the other hand, it means that you now need to trust that Apple isn’t going to fuck with the podcasts you listen to.<p>Other podcast clients (like Overcast) started doing this long before Apple. If you want to do timely notifications for new episodes, synchronisation, waste less power on the phone doing useless polling, etc., this is a fairly obvious thing to do.<p>And if you’re using Apple’s Podcast app, the server-side crawling changes nothing wrt. their ability to “fuck with” podcasts. They could’ve done that client-side too.

&gt; 40% is nothing to shake a stick at. If you entered the podcasting space (like Spotify did) and captured 40% of users, you’d have an amazing product.<p>Didn&#x27;t Spotify spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get exclusive rights to podcasts (Joe Rogan comes to mind)? That isn&#x27;t very innovative, and it actively reduces the choice and competition in the marketplace.<p>Good for Joe Rogan though (allegedly) getting $200+ million out of Spotify.

I’m surprised there hasn’t been more public outcry by hosters about this. This is a huge affront to how the podcast ecosystem works.<p>Well this is going to be a problem for podcastsaver as well.<p>What s scummy move by Apple, the nice thing about podcasts is that it’s a very open technology — all you needed was RSS.<p>Syndicate with apple but don’t host your data exclusively there.

I&#x27;m sorry but you&#x27;d have to be a fool to host your podcast on Apple.... I&#x27;m shocked that Apple&#x27;s podcast hosting ever had an option to export the data. I&#x27;ve never used Apple podcasting services for listening because it always seemed like a huge pain designed to lock you in. There&#x27;s plenty of free Podcast apps out there. And IMHO -- if it doesn&#x27;t have an RSS feed it&#x27;s not a podcast. (Looking at you, Patreon Substack Spotify Rokfin etc)

It seems bizarre to me that any serious podcast would fail to retain:<p>- Their own backups of their master audio<p>- Separate uploads to competing services with significant market share (e.g. Spotify)<p>It&#x27;s not really surprising that Apple DRM-locks the audio files pulled from their podcast service. They should have messaged that better, but Apple has DRM locked everything coming from their music services for a very long time.

I was recently on a long drive and, if I had started listening to a podcast, then listened to something else, then tried to resume the podcast, it wouldn’t play. I tried multiple episodes, marking it as played, restarting the app, and restarting the phone and still couldn’t resume.<p>Funnily enough, the podcast was ATP, wherein Marco Arment frequently discusses his podcast app Overcast.

How does this relate to the thousands of podcasts that are listed in the iTunes podcast directory and that are freely playable on any podcast app on any platform?<p>Is this for a special set of podcasts that are using Apple&#x27;s system to manage access to paid subscriptions? If that is the case, then this seems reasonable.

This is bad behavior, antithetical to the spirit of podcasting. Offering DRM for paid subscriptions, or as an option, is one thing, but requiring it whether the podcast host wishes it or not is not defensible.

Would love to see the whiteboards at Apple showing all the flow chart strategies to trap people with DRM.

So Apple is offering a podcast hosting service, but it uses some proprietary thing instead of RSS and DRM&#x27;s the audio so other podcast clients can&#x27;t play them, and the podcast owner can&#x27;t easily switch to a different podcast host (including one that this post&#x27;s author runs). It doesn&#x27;t tell the podcast owner that. I have never used a podcast, so is this all correct?<p>If so, I agree this is a deliberately snaky move on Apple&#x27;s part.

This is pretty clearly Apples attempt to create a Patreon podcast competitor &amp; refers to the “Apple Podcasters Program” [1]. It’s not designed to host regular, free feeds in the traditional RSS style, quite deliberately. When signing up it is made very clear that there is no RSS feed &amp; what the perks&#x2F;restrictions of joining are.<p>The DRM, the fact there’s no RSS feed, the initial hosting cost - it all stems from the fact this is a service designed to host paid podcasts that subscribers can pay to access - of course it’s going to be closed off and restricted…<p>The header on the documentation page reads “Join the Apple Podcasters Program to start selling your subscriptions on Apple Podcasts”.<p>The article is poorly researched at best and likely thinly disguised marketing for the authors service, knowing most will just take them at their word without digging into the specifics of these ridiculous criticisms.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcasters.apple.com&#x2F;support&#x2F;892-apple-podcasters-program-overview" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcasters.apple.com&#x2F;support&#x2F;892-apple-podcasters-pr...</a>

Each apple product is designed this way. It is designed to lock people in and make people conform to the apple certified way. That&#x27;s what made me leave the eco system. I&#x27;ll never buy anything from Apple again. I thought everybody knew by now what apple does.

Weird, I&#x27;ve extracted Podcasts from my iPhone&#x27;s backup, which I can play on any device.<p>Also, the Apple Podcast app shows you episodes that are subscription only, and you cannot mark them as &#x27;played&#x27;, they stay there, on top, taunting you...

The Podcast Index is created to preserve, protect and extend the open, independent podcasting ecosystem: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcastindex.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcastindex.org&#x2F;</a>

To use Doctorow&#x27;s term: the &quot;enshittification&quot; of Apple Podcasrs

&gt;What I learned is that Apple does not produce an RSS feed for podcasts that they host. 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.<p>Spotify is doing the same thing and has been for years. Nobody seemed to care about it then?

&gt;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.<p>I&#x27;d guess the opposite, it&#x27;s the mindset of a company that feels they lost dominance over the podcasting world and are trying to hold on what&#x27;s left.

&gt; even choosing to download the audio in Apple Podcasts makes it available for offline listening, but doesn’t produce an MP3 or M4A file that you can move around or archive—it retains its DRM.<p>Can this be solved by use of, e.g. Audio Hijack? (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rogueamoeba.com&#x2F;audiohijack&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rogueamoeba.com&#x2F;audiohijack&#x2F;</a>)

I think some of these issues stem from the paid subscriptions part (especially the lack of an RSS feed). I&#x27;m not very familiar with RSS, but is there a solution for authenticated RSS yet?<p>The authentication could be used to validate that you&#x27;re a subscriber, and push out subscriber-only content, allowing creators to monetize in more ways while also keeping the platform open.

Perhaps there were special deals in place for high profile podcasts?<p>I’ve never used the Apple Podcast app, and only learned about the Apple only features while listening to John Carreyrou‘s podcast during the Theranos trial. They had member only episodes (paid) which were only accesible using Apple’s app, but they also had a public RSS feed which excluded those members only episodes.

I don&#x27;t know why anyone is surprised. Apple&#x27;s entire business model is trapping unwitting potential customers.

Aren&#x27;t there ways to ummm... &quot;circumvent&quot; Apple&#x27;s DRM?<p>Given that the people migrating the podcasts are the actual copyright owners, that should not even be illegal? (But I am not an expert.)<p>By looking online I see some random software for removing Apple&#x27;s FairPlay, but it&#x27;s all commercial.

Is it Apple Podcasts Subscriptions[0]?<p>I don&#x27;t use their app (Overcast for iOS is great!), so I wasn&#x27;t familiar with any of this, but most of their site seems focused on the usual podcast stuff, same as it has been for a long time. When I started digging to find the bad behavior, I eventually came across this page about subscriptions.<p>Is the idea that people who have an existing podcast and are tired of paying the S3 or OVH bill (or whatever) look into this &quot;Apple Podcasts Subscriptions&quot; service and it says right up top you can offer your podcast for free. So they click through to the pricing page[1] and see that they can sign up for $20&#x2F;year and keep offering their show for free, and it isn&#x27;t clear on the publicly-available pages I&#x27;ve linked so far that this is going to break your podcast, making it no longer freely available everywhere.<p>It&#x27;s possible that&#x27;s buried somewhere in the fine print, and given how many lawyers Apple employs, I&#x27;d be shocked if it&#x27;s not. Still, this is BAD behavior, a bait-and-switch.<p>It&#x27;s possible to offer podcasts by subscription. Even on their own list of hosting providers[2] they mention Blubrry, Libsyn, Omny, and RSS.com, all of which do that. (Most of them charge more than $20&#x2F;year for hosting, too.) But critically, all of those still offer a feed so you can listen in the app of your choice. Once you take away the feed and lock it down to only your app, you&#x27;re not producing a podcast anymore. You&#x27;re producing an on-demand audio show, like Spotify does.<p>I get the appeal. Spotify and Apple both can say &quot;using our app, you can listen to any podcast, PLUS a bunch of shows exclusive to us!&quot; But of course, Spotify&#x27;s exclusives can&#x27;t be listened to in Apple Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts exclusives can&#x27;t be listened to in Spotify, because they&#x27;re not actually podcasts at that point.<p>Apple should know better. They&#x27;re usually better than this. Shame on Apple.<p>0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcasters.apple.com&#x2F;878-subscriptions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcasters.apple.com&#x2F;878-subscriptions</a><p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcasters.apple.com&#x2F;support&#x2F;904-availability-of-apple-podcasts-features" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcasters.apple.com&#x2F;support&#x2F;904-availability-of-app...</a><p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcasters.apple.com&#x2F;partner-search" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcasters.apple.com&#x2F;partner-search</a>

&gt; Sure enough, opening the m3u8 playlist, there is Apple Fairplay DRM info.<p>This is just straight up egregious. They are encoding your freely distributed content with their DRM. Without offering any method of removing it. Surely there is some licencing issue there.

Ah, Apple.<p>Watch the classic Apple &quot;Rip, Mix, Burn&quot; commercial.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=NBPp-h3uNs8">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=NBPp-h3uNs8</a>

I find it really odd that one would have all their audio in a cloud service, that they use to send out that podcast. I&#x27;ve got mine on my local computer. I upload those, but I keep the masters.

The single reason my podcast Merged is not on Apple yet is because it’s too damn hard to register to Apple Podcasts. Apple missed out on podcasts and left Spotify to make the big numbers and money.

I was interested to read the article and comments here because I am a very happy user of Apple Podcasts, but had not thought about the service from a content creator standpoint.<p>One question I had is: if you want to make money from a podcast, is it really so bad to just pick one platform like Apple Podcasts, or YouTube, or, etc.?<p>As a small business, isn’t having one simple to use platform pretty good?<p>Also, I have experienced ‘free’ access to one Premium podcast, and I never minded that I only got to listen to part of it. That was Sam Harris’s podcast, and I would be surprised if that was an Apple exclusive, so how does that work?<p>Off topic, but: I love the Apple Podcast service. I only subscribe to about ten podcasts, but that is enough for lots of good content, and I wear an Apple Watch and almost always have my AirPods with me, so the podcasts are always easy to get to.

Without understanding DRM that well, I’m wondering if there are analog workarounds. You can’t encrypt a sound wave between the speaker and the eardrum.

&gt; <i>Here’s what’s fucked: once you’ve started using Apple for hosting, you’re stuck.</i><p>The fundamental misunderstanding is that Apple is not hosting the source RSS feed or media. As someone who operates a podcast hosting service, it&#x27;s bizarre to me that the author doesn&#x27;t understand this.<p>&gt; <i>This customer was pasting their Apple listing URL, but the import tool was not getting a feed back.</i><p>Of course, because it&#x27;s not an RSS feed URL. And again, I&#x27;m shocked that this person doesn&#x27;t understand the difference.

Wait -- there are podcasts you just can&#x27;t listen to if you don&#x27;t have an Apple device? That&#x27;s beyond absurd.

More great fodder for the antitrust trials.

Would GDPR request under Article 15 work to get your data out?

Apple Podcasts does not have a silence-trimming feature, which is reason enough to not use it.<p>It would be nice if you could have a single podcast RSS backend with multiple client apps, like you can with text RSS.

I deliberately don&#x27;t use any of Apple&#x27;s services, even though I own an iPhone. The only thing I use is the App Store, and even then I&#x27;m a minimalist as to what I install. If I want to listen to podcasts, I use the VLC Player app, and grab the podcast from the Podcast&#x27;s official site, and then use iTunes to transfer the .MP3 to VLC, over USB.<p>Cause I&#x27;m oldskool like that. If the podcast in question doesn&#x27;t have a site where I can download episodes at my leisure, I send a friendly e-mail to the podcast asking them to provide downloadable MP3s so I can avoid the vendor lock-in of Apple and other companies (who also build a profile of your listening habits, because they chant they need it for &#x27;improvements to our service&#x27;).