This is great! Major refactors like this are always such a difficult prospect for a number of reasons, and take real dedication and love. For people doing this for open source like Antenna Pod, my gratitude for you is immense!<p>Interestingly though, depending on your perspective can be good or bad. For example, the improvement for <i>new</i> contributors and for the people doing the refactor will be huge and lovely. So much easier to work in!<p>For the people who were familiar with the tangled mess before though, it can be a real set back. I've been in that boat before, and it basically wipes away all your prior knowledge and puts you at least back at square 1, sometimes at like -15 because you have to <i>unlearn</i> all the old stuff and that can be really hard to do. If all the older contributors were gone then this is not really a problem, but if I were one of them I probably wouldn't contribute anymore, not out of irritiation or spite or anything like that, just that it's too much of an uphill battle and there are other projects where I could contribute more efficiently. Definitely not a reason not to do the refactor, but it is something I had never considered before until I was on that side of it.<p>So if the only contributors are older contributors, and they are still around, it can be difficult. If the older contributors have moved on or are the ones doing the refactoring, or if most contributions are from newer members, then it's a huge win.
Loving this<p>>AntennaPod doesn’t need a lot of money. Our (annual) costs are already covered by our existing donation funds. Therefore, we’d much prefer it if you
donate to your favorite podcast(er), orhelp us with a non-monetary contribution.
Glad to have a FOSS podcast app. I switched to Antennapod after Google Podcasts shut down. I have about a dozen podcasts I listen to, half of them from Patreon RSS feeds. Works great!
Still waiting for them to catch up and join the revolution of sat streaming, boostagrams , and other <i>Podcasting 2.0</i> features.
Still my app of choice (due to F-Droid availability and many years of playback history).
Great article - it's always interesting to see refactoring tools like that used in real life. I'm a daily user of AntennaPod and it is the best podcast app I've ever used.
Semi related. I wonder if they are planning to use the open podcast API <a href="https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3390-introducing-the-open-podcast-api/" rel="nofollow">https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3390-intr...</a>
I've encountered this kind of poor encapsulation in other open source projects quite frequently. It's often one of the main blockers to contributing, for me.<p>Congratulations to AntennaPod for spending three years to clean this up.
I absolutely <i>loved</i> AntennaPod back when I had an Android phone -- I actually never really "attended" to it though: I installed it, it worked, never gave me any issue. Now that I own an iPhone, I really miss having a quality app like AntennaPod.
I love love love AntennaPod. Top 5 apps for me and there's a GPodder Sync app for Nextcloud so you can easily use it across devices with no third party clouds.
How is antenna pod? My experience with these kinds of open-source apps aimed at end users is that unless there's any kind of actual product or design direction saying yes/no to every little thing someone in the community wants to add, it turns into a bloated mess for everyone except for the community experts in open-source podcast apps.<p>It's pretty much always developers that are the main contributors in communities like this and they want everything to be configurable. So you get things like a bunch of inputs and sliders for configuring various buffer sizes and timeouts and whatnot.<p>I use Pocket Casts and love it because it's simple and looks nice and works great.<p>How is antenna pod?