The audacity of Apple Podcasts
Is it Apple Podcasts Subscriptions[0]?<p>I don't use their app (Overcast for iOS is great!), so I wasn'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 "Apple Podcasts Subscriptions" 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/year and keep offering their show for free, and it isn't clear on the publicly-available pages I've linked so far that this is going to break your podcast, making it no longer freely available everywhere.<p>It's possible that's buried somewhere in the fine print, and given how many lawyers Apple employs, I'd be shocked if it's not. Still, this is BAD behavior, a bait-and-switch.<p>It'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/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're not producing a podcast anymore. You're producing an on-demand audio show, like Spotify does.<p>I get the appeal. Spotify and Apple both can say "using our app, you can listen to any podcast, PLUS a bunch of shows exclusive to us!" But of course, Spotify's exclusives can't be listened to in Apple Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts exclusives can't be listened to in Spotify, because they're not actually podcasts at that point.<p>Apple should know better. They're usually better than this. Shame on Apple.<p>0. <a href="https://podcasters.apple.com/878-subscriptions" rel="nofollow">https://podcasters.apple.com/878-subscriptions</a><p>1. <a href="https://podcasters.apple.com/support/904-availability-of-apple-podcasts-features" rel="nofollow">https://podcasters.apple.com/support/904-availability-of-app...</a><p>2. <a href="https://podcasters.apple.com/partner-search" rel="nofollow">https://podcasters.apple.com/partner-search</a>