To play devil's advocate here, clearly there are hosting costs and maintenance costs beyond a one time mobile app payment 14 years ago.
Kinda sped read the article so apologies if I missed it, but why does the author here feel so entitled to something that clearly the company feels unreasonable to continuously maintain? They're clearly a struggling business, it feels like this author has a personal vendetta against the company and would rather they go out of business than break a 14 year old promise made from an entirely different internet economy era.
I think it is sort of incumbent upon you, as a business offering a lifetime membership, to properly invest some of that initial fee, such that the returns cover future operating costs. Many other companies work on this model.
If the bank refused to return the money I loaned them, I would rightfully be very upset. I think it's similarly fair to be upset about a company revoking lifetime memberships.
This particular situation is more of a grey area, but I don't think maintenance and operating costs are a sufficient excuse.
it seems to me that we desperately need to get back to a place where a business is held to their word.
we have come to a place where corporations are calling limited “unlimited” and outright just lying to people.
i have seen people unironically defend this as “well if they don’t lie, then how do you expect them to sell their product?” again, people have said this entirely unironically.
i think it’s far more reasonable to expect a company to be held to their contracts and agreements. normal people certainly are.
i’ll never understand how we got to a place where so many corporations can say with a straight face “we deserve to make money in any way possible and it’s unfair for you to hold us to any kind of responsibility for our own actions”
1. A few kb of playlists and accounts
2. Probably a search service
3. Likely artwork caching
It's not free to run this.. but it's not exactly expensive either.
Many users pay and don't use the app very much. I am sure there are some super users who use a lot.
And most apps continue to sell, make enough income to fund a few devs and keep the services on. Even with a one time payment.
It's not like pocketcasts is paying the podcasters or producing content.
The problem is seeing every single dumb thing as some kind of mega-growth M&A deal when it's not. No, your podcast app won't make you hundreds of millions, sorry.
The company sold an app and refuses to honor what users paid for. If this is allowed, it will become a strategy because it's profitable. Trick people to purchase, then add ads to the 'ad-free' app. There's no logic other than, "we can steal and no one will stop us." They should be forced to honor purchases or publish a new app.
Is Automattic a struggling business? Also, podcasters are paying for media hosting. Automattic presumably hosts a catalog service, but it can’t be that expensive to run.
There's no reasonable devil's advocate. The answer is that one-time fee apps are not sustainable. There are ongoing costs with most businesses and one-time fees do not capture that. Therefore don't sell them. Sell everything on subscription or you will eventually fail to serve your customers and everyone will be unhappy. If you're a big business, it's risky to buy open-source applications, so don't do that unless the benefit is obvious.
They promised a thing they could not deliver on and that was sufficient to get enough users that they could then sell the app onwards to a bunch of suckers. This is a classic play in the "sell dollars for pennies and then sell the dollars-for-pennies app to a guy with a lot of dollars who eventually gets sick of buying pennies with dollars" genre.
Because we paid to not have to put up with this garbage.
There's so many better ways to do this - look at nzb360 - https://nzb360.com/
They added a new/better interface you have to pay money to unlock. When they add new features/services you now have to pay to unlock. What you paid for originally, still yours. Want to get access to the new stuff? You can either pay a subscription for "everything" or pay one-time-unlocks for features.
Then I look at serviecs like lichess where they just operate 100% on donations and users helping by adding their devices into the pool of compute for analysis.
"Shove ads in" is the low, easiest, tackiest way to "annoy" your users into paying. Those that already paid once are annoyed the goalposts have changed. Make the app worth paying an upgrade for, don't just go "well it's still shit but now there's ads unless you pay!"
It's so sad this view is supported by so many people. So incredibly sad, especially in this community... I feel like we're doomed to become the dreaded "you will own nothing and be happy" society that the technofeudal lords so drool over.
If you don't honor contracts, then you should go out of business, because nobody will trust you (if they're wise, though there are always some people/companies who will be foolish).
If you make a contract that involves you receiving a one-time fee for something that will cost you far more than that fee, then you will eventually go out of business for being stupid.
Yes, there are hosting costs and maintenance costs. So the original deal (pay once for something that costs us ongoing money) was a stupid business decision. Doesn't change the fact that they undertook to make that contract. So now they should be held to it.
And the fact that someone else bought them does not invalidate the contract. When you acquire a business, you acquire their contractual obligations. As it should be, otherwise contracts cannot be trusted in the long run.
Howdy! There might be a misunderstanding: Anyone who has ever paid for Pocket Casts, even before Automattic acquired it, should not see ads. If you did, that's a bug and we'll fix it.
Longer context: At Automattic, we take very seriously the sustainability of the promises we make to users of our products, including serving trillions of free requests to WP.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and many other services over the years.
We want every product to be self-sustaining, so it doesn't rely on my benevolence, but instead has an engine of value creation and capture that can be something we continue to maintain and support for decades to come. We really do think long-term, as evidenced by our 100-year plan on WP.com.
The Pocket Casts business model is similar to that of many other products, featuring a free version with ads and a paid upgrade with additional features and no ads, much like Spotify, YouTube, and others.
As a matter of engineering ethics, I don't believe in "lifetime" purchases, and we don't create new ones at Automattic, but we have honored the legacy people who paid a one-time fee to Pocket Casts when they were a startup with basically what we call a "Champions" account, which is a lifetime you-get-the-best-of-whatever-we-sell deal. There are only a few thousand of these folks, so it seemed better to try and make it more of a gift than attempt to migrate people to what is actually a sustainable business model, which is a recurring subscription.
We open-sourced Pocket Casts after acquiring it because I believe that in the podcasting world, it's vital to have an open-source alternative to proprietary distribution networks.
> Anyone who has ever paid for Pocket Casts, even before Automattic acquired it, should not see ads. If you did, that's a bug and we'll fix it.
I appreciate that. I hope you do. But I do not for one second believe the truth of it. If it were true, you wouldn't have been having customer service respond to people complaining about this by trying to hock a paid subscription. In both emails and in your forums.
This is not a bug in the technical sense. At best, it is choosing to walk back a policy after pushback.
> we have honored the legacy people who paid a one-time fee to Pocket Casts when they were a startup with basically what we call a "Champions" account
This is, as of now, factually untrue. Only those who paid for the web version get that. It should have been for everyone, and hopefully now you will apply it to everyone. But when you first announced paid subscriptions you were very clear: those who paid for the web version get premium for free. And even that was only done because the web version was being locked behind premium, and only after pushback for your first plan of giving them one year free.
For those of us who bought the app on iOS and Android, the promise of "pay once, use forever" was broken a long time ago. It is only because the features being granted by that paid version were not actually very appealing that it didn't become much of an issue before now.
By adding ads into a product people paid for (your customer service representatives are lying in your forums by saying it's a "free product"), you've crossed a line. The answer now is to make sure those of us who paid for your app (not once, but twice) get the full version of it, just like the advertising promised us when we bought it.
Hi Matt,
I purchased the Android app in 2016. I never signed up for the paid syncing service, but never had ads within the app until this week. Is it the new policy that users who purchased the app but never paid for syncing will now have ads, or is this a bug?
Appreciate you being public in places like this. I sent a similar message to Pocketcasts support but received an AI that seems to disagree with your comment here.
Are you lying or just not aware of what is going on in your own company? I paid for Pocket Casts many years ago and am now seeing ads. I just emailed support and got a form email that basically said, "Nah, pay us $40 a year."
> There might be a misunderstanding: Anyone who has ever paid for Pocket Casts, even before Automattic acquired it, should not see ads. If you did, that's a bug and we'll fix it.
This is not true for people, like me, who only bought the Android version. We were not tagged with "Champion", but this was stated: "you’ll still have access to the mobile app features you paid for".
This was in the description of the app at the time:
"There are many more powerful, straight forward features help you make Pocket Casts yours and in case you were wondering, here’s what Pocket Casts DOESN’T have: ads, episode limits, pushy trials, feature bloat or plugins.
It. Just. Works."
Now I have ads, and when I try to dismiss them I am greeted with a pushy sales pitch for a subscription.
Life is too short for this, and I've moved on to another app. But perhaps this is insightful as to why some users are frustrated and upset.
I also purchased the lifetime no-ads option, and now get ads. Support says you have to buy a subscription. This is a widespread issue that seems to be affecting most if not all users. If you check the reviews on the play store there are many hundreds of 1 start reviews over the last few days and the app rating has dropped from 4.2 to 3.7.
A thread was also pointing out in the google support forums for another app that did the same thing, ignoring a no-ads purchase and forcing a new subscription, and google asked to report the app from the store as this violates their terms of service
Hi Matt, I originally paid for the Google Play version back in 2011 and the iOS version in 2012, but unfortunately I am also seeing adds now. Thank you for commenting publicly here, when I wrote to support I just got an automatic response. It seems that I am also affected by the bug. Would you please be able to fix the issue with my account? Thanks again.
BTW, for builders, I think having some of these "golden ticket" accounts of your earliest adopters and promoters is a good strategy. The best marketing is word of mouth and seeing people love and use a product. We have some across Automattic where you can get a lifetime Jetpack or WP.com subscription for free for doing something awesome.
As a pocket casts user idk why it even costs money to run this app. Just developer cost? Almost all the work is just local on the device and fetching the RSS feed? Anyone else know why this needs external servers at all?
I think they have their own podcast index that you can search through. They also sync your listening progress to the cloud. But with PocketCasts Plus being $66 AUD/year, surely those subscriptions are enough to cover the costs.
I used to subscribe to PocketCasts Plus, but I stopped when they raised the price. It's so expensive.
I've been super duper happy with AntennaPod since I discovered it a few years ago! It's perfectly useable right out of the gate but has nice customizations if you want/need it. And the Android Auto support is great (essential since I do most podcast listening in the car).
Caveat: I *only* listen to Podcasts on my phone so I don't have to think about syncing library/status between devices.
For listening on my PC I use 'Bluetooth Audio Receiver' and still just play from my phone and use my computer as an audio device. I've found any advanced setups just no longer worth the setup investment/hassle. Literally nothing in this future timeline works well in any complex setup. So I keep it simple. It all exists in it's own magic box. And if I get a call, etc, all that auto behavior (stop playback) just works.
To be fair, in Star Trek you will see them carrying around like 3-4 data tablets, so even our broken enshittified tech works in a way Star Trek future predictors thought would be high tech.
I recently switched from Pocket Casts to AntennaPod. AntennaPod is also available in F-Droid, which Pocket Casts isn't. It feels less likely that AntennaPod will be enshittified, which is why I made the switch.
I purchased this app way back in 2014 when I did Android dev FT. I had no idea about the history until recently when I began seeing ads. Comapnies should be prohibited by Google Play Store or someone else from rug pulls like this, otherwise it will become a normal business strategy. What's to stop someone from building an app fast by selling lifetime ad free, then when they build a user base, selling to a large company who does this? Nothing. That's what.
They should be forced to publish a new APK with a different name to change monetization strategies or honor what people paid for. This is fraud and theft.
I've been following the whole upset about the banner ad. As a podcast app, 90% of the time I have it in the background, and I'm not doomscrolling on the app. So the banner ad doesn't really bother me.
The argument on a "lifetime subscription" also does not really apply here. The app was a one-time purchase and then made free somewhere in 2019. Their logic was that early app purchasers would still receive the same set of features when the app was made free and a subscription was introduced. Source https://support.pocketcasts.com/knowledge-base/lifetime-acce...
Basically, purchasers didn't lose any features in 2019 onwards. The purchase was also for the entire app, not just an ad-free version, as there were no ads to begin with.
I switched to Pocket Casts because the official Apple app changed their UI to a recommendation feed instead of a plain timeline. I only listen to podcasts on a single device, anyone have suggestions for alternatives? I don't mind paying a one time fee, but this should really be a mostly (completely?) cloud-less app.
I've been satisfied using Downcast for a long time now. US $3 (though I have used the tipping feature because it's provided me ample value). In particular, its sorting organization matches my preference, which is a list of podcasts that I can sort based on unplayed episodes (among other sorting options). Unless you're viewing the distinct section of the app for adding episodes, there's no portion of the interface trying to promote shows. That's not a presentation I ever want, so it's good that it's easily avoided.
Most beneficial for me is its customizations that can be applied to all shows or configured for individual shows. For example, all episodes for all shows can be set to play at 1¼x speed, but one show could be set to play at 1x speed. For me, the interview format can be at the faster speed, but the music podcast is better at regular speed. Similarly, users could set all shows' episodes to start at the 30-second mark because of, say, opening ads, but a specific show could be set to start at a different time because its opening is unlike the others.
I listen to enough shows that these configuration options make the app great for me. It's been a long time since I tried alternatives, but none of them ever stuck for more than (at most) a few days because the presentation or lack of customizations were less satisfying or convenient.
Truthfully, just writing this has compelled me to give the developer another in-app tip. It's been years since I did that and I must average at least 20 hours of use a week.
I'm very happy with Overcast. It does show ads for other podcasts in the now playing screen if you're using the free version. Premium is a subscription, but it's like 10 bucks a year. That's perfectly okay. And to be honest, I rarely look at the "now playing" screen anyways
I bought the app back when it was just three developers. Things started going down hill after NPR acquired them.
I switched over to Spotify. The only gripe I have with Spotify is when my phone encounters a dead spot, Spotify puts up a modal "You're offline" and loses my place in the podcast.
have just been in the process of rage uninstalling this app due to the ads
To be clear, it's not just that they added ads, but they are obnoxiously in the main active screen while things are playing. Made me also disrespect Automattic as well as this seems very poor behaviour on their part.
This is a great way to sour many customers for all products automatic owns. I don’t buy the “it must be a bug story.” They just flipped the switch and only deal with the squeaky wheels for people that complain.
Did I expect free updates and features forever. No, Only the bare minimum to keep it running.
Hell, if it was owned by a small company or an individual I wouldn’t mind donating to keep it maintained once in a while. I don’t feel the need for a subscription for a podcast app. The fanciest feature I’ve used in the past 10 years is the sleep after 15 min options.
Saddest is that they are advertising their own apps. Good to know which one to avoid.
$800,000 net loss? What in the mismanaged business world are you even doing? I've built feed aggregators in the past... I just can't understand where the costs ar.
Are they rehosting all the audio and that's bandwidth costs? Even then it seemed high.
They are definitely not rehosting. I can tell that certain podcasts are streaming with much more latency compared to others hosted closer to where I live.
I am one of the later subscribers, but I was subscribing for 16 EUR/y, when they've bumped the subscription to eye-watering 45 EUR. So far they have respected the deal and I am still paying the initial amount.
I am sympathetic with author, but unfortunately it is also one, if not the best podcast app technically. It has this 0-bullshit UI which does what you expect without enforcing some maddening organization patterns (Castro) of fancy UI with hilarious amount of bugs (looking at you, Overcast).
It has the "mark as played" button, also in car play.
It is the only one I've found capable to pull the episode on Apple Watch over network, instead of relying on pre-caching from phone app.
I would be very sad if PocketCasts goes out of business.
P.S.: I checked and it seems that Overcast also has cellular streaming on AW - I need to test it again.
I worked for a company that did audio streaming and the problem is that cloud providers' bandwidth is expensive af, only option is to own your machines in a datacenter and negotiate bandwidth prices with an ISP
I'm almost a week late but they don't stream audio from their servers. Your device pulls directly from RSS feeds which individual podcasts are in charge of maintaining and paying hosting costs.
They do have a few online features they run, like syncing your subscribed podcasts and listening progress and whatnot, and I think they have their own index of RSS links for searching, but nothing compared to streaming audio.
Anyway, as of today they backtracked on showing ads to people who purchased the app before it went free. I guess they're claiming it was a bug, which I don't really believe but I don't care as long as they undid making the app ugly.
lifetime, no-ads deals that are supposed to sustain a for-profit company are mostly a scam, unless it's a free tier designed to upsell (e.g. Dropbox). That's it.
Not a good month for me and entertainment. First I drop twitch turbo because they started showing ads and their support said, it happens nothing they can do about it.
Now I need a new podcast app after using Pocketcasts since 2016.
Any Suggestions for iPhone that I can easily move to from pocketcast?
This has nothing to do with the content of the article, but is anyone else annoyed by that link style, or is it only me? To me, the link style where the underline partially overlaps the baseline of the text (not just characters with descenders like g and q and y, but the actual baseline so that it overlaps nearly all characters) harms readability.
I'm also not a huge fan of the way hovering over the link turns it into a highlight on the word, but that's not a huge readability issue because the highlight covers the entire character. But having the non-hovered link underline be fat, so that it partially overlaps the baseline of the characters, means that those characters are superimposed on two different backgrounds, pale blue and pale red, and that harms readability.
This site isn't the only one that does this, or I might not be complaining. It's a style that seems to be popular, and I really don't know why. It's a bad idea and people should stop doing it.
> You were a pay-once app. Released in 2011, pay once each for Android, iOS, and Web and keep for life.
You know. I approve the pushback on enshitification. But there’s something weird about righteous fury over an app which literally costs money to run didn’t provide free updates for literally decades on what probably cost like $5.
It's reasonable to feel that reneging on the deal is wrong, while also recognising that $5 for 14 years (and counting) of value is far too low a price. There's no good answer here.
The company is stuck in a bad place where the most loyal users, probably those getting the most value out of it in the long run, aren't paying for it. Subscriptions for newer users are one way, or trying to upsell existing users, but this subscription is exceptionally expensive for what it is, and they can only monetise the non-standard feature set.
I'd like to see a return to versioned software. Call Pocket Casts done, fork it, release Pocket Casts 2 for $20 with all these features. Next year release Pocket Casts 3 for another $20. People can update or not, up to them.
As someone who paid the $5-10 in 2014 for the same app, I think I would've just preferred it no longer updating, to be honest. When NPR bought the app, they spent the next year adding a number of features I never used (a few of which made the app function worse for my particular usage pattern, and many of which I imagine substantially increased their server costs), and pushed a number of UI redesigns that were less to my personal taste.
I don't personally have the "righteous fury" of the article's author (I'm more just annoyed and disappointed that a nice thing I liked is now noticeably less nice, for complex social and economic reasons outside any one person's control), but I can certainly understand why a person would be mad enough to fork a repo and write a couple hundred words in a blog post.
It would actually be fine to me if they left the old app to rot and spun up a new one as a subscription model. Eventually the old one would break and we'd shrug our shoulders and move on.
However instead they took the existing app and vandalised it, abusing the user's privacy and invading their eyeballs.
Just a note: Overcast is written and maintained by one person - Marco Arment - including server maintenance and has been for over a decade. He also created his own non scammy ad platform that just lets companies buy banner ads based on the category of the podcast.
You get very little extra for the $15/year subscription fee. That’s not a complaint. You get all of the features that most people care about in the Fred version.
It’s available for the iPhones, iPads and the web with full CarPlay support and it syncs podcasts to the Apple Watch.
He did learn from his mistake of making Instapaper a one time payment and sold it.
For those who don’t know, he was the cofounder of Tumblr.
wmichelin|5 months ago
Kinda sped read the article so apologies if I missed it, but why does the author here feel so entitled to something that clearly the company feels unreasonable to continuously maintain? They're clearly a struggling business, it feels like this author has a personal vendetta against the company and would rather they go out of business than break a 14 year old promise made from an entirely different internet economy era.
derektank|5 months ago
If the bank refused to return the money I loaned them, I would rightfully be very upset. I think it's similarly fair to be upset about a company revoking lifetime memberships.
This particular situation is more of a grey area, but I don't think maintenance and operating costs are a sufficient excuse.
jszymborski|5 months ago
People were promised they just needed to pay one fee to get the app.
Then, they went to a subscription fee, but grandfathered in previous purchasers.
Now, they've introduced ads.
Their overhead is their problem, they sold me something and now they are renegging. It's like the first thing in the article, not exactly burried.
toofy|5 months ago
we have come to a place where corporations are calling limited “unlimited” and outright just lying to people.
i have seen people unironically defend this as “well if they don’t lie, then how do you expect them to sell their product?” again, people have said this entirely unironically.
i think it’s far more reasonable to expect a company to be held to their contracts and agreements. normal people certainly are.
i’ll never understand how we got to a place where so many corporations can say with a straight face “we deserve to make money in any way possible and it’s unfair for you to hold us to any kind of responsibility for our own actions”
vorpalhex|5 months ago
1. A few kb of playlists and accounts 2. Probably a search service 3. Likely artwork caching
It's not free to run this.. but it's not exactly expensive either.
Many users pay and don't use the app very much. I am sure there are some super users who use a lot.
And most apps continue to sell, make enough income to fund a few devs and keep the services on. Even with a one time payment.
It's not like pocketcasts is paying the podcasters or producing content.
The problem is seeing every single dumb thing as some kind of mega-growth M&A deal when it's not. No, your podcast app won't make you hundreds of millions, sorry.
UmGuys|5 months ago
CharlesW|5 months ago
renewiltord|5 months ago
They promised a thing they could not deliver on and that was sufficient to get enough users that they could then sell the app onwards to a bunch of suckers. This is a classic play in the "sell dollars for pennies and then sell the dollars-for-pennies app to a guy with a lot of dollars who eventually gets sick of buying pennies with dollars" genre.
muppetman|5 months ago
They added a new/better interface you have to pay money to unlock. When they add new features/services you now have to pay to unlock. What you paid for originally, still yours. Want to get access to the new stuff? You can either pay a subscription for "everything" or pay one-time-unlocks for features.
Then I look at serviecs like lichess where they just operate 100% on donations and users helping by adding their devices into the pool of compute for analysis.
"Shove ads in" is the low, easiest, tackiest way to "annoy" your users into paying. Those that already paid once are annoyed the goalposts have changed. Make the app worth paying an upgrade for, don't just go "well it's still shit but now there's ads unless you pay!"
zmmmmm|5 months ago
Because they paid for it.
galaxy_gas|5 months ago
wahnfrieden|5 months ago
gigel82|5 months ago
rmunn|5 months ago
If you make a contract that involves you receiving a one-time fee for something that will cost you far more than that fee, then you will eventually go out of business for being stupid.
Yes, there are hosting costs and maintenance costs. So the original deal (pay once for something that costs us ongoing money) was a stupid business decision. Doesn't change the fact that they undertook to make that contract. So now they should be held to it.
And the fact that someone else bought them does not invalidate the contract. When you acquire a business, you acquire their contractual obligations. As it should be, otherwise contracts cannot be trusted in the long run.
N_Lens|5 months ago
[deleted]
photomatt|5 months ago
Longer context: At Automattic, we take very seriously the sustainability of the promises we make to users of our products, including serving trillions of free requests to WP.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and many other services over the years.
We want every product to be self-sustaining, so it doesn't rely on my benevolence, but instead has an engine of value creation and capture that can be something we continue to maintain and support for decades to come. We really do think long-term, as evidenced by our 100-year plan on WP.com.
The Pocket Casts business model is similar to that of many other products, featuring a free version with ads and a paid upgrade with additional features and no ads, much like Spotify, YouTube, and others.
As a matter of engineering ethics, I don't believe in "lifetime" purchases, and we don't create new ones at Automattic, but we have honored the legacy people who paid a one-time fee to Pocket Casts when they were a startup with basically what we call a "Champions" account, which is a lifetime you-get-the-best-of-whatever-we-sell deal. There are only a few thousand of these folks, so it seemed better to try and make it more of a gift than attempt to migrate people to what is actually a sustainable business model, which is a recurring subscription.
We open-sourced Pocket Casts after acquiring it because I believe that in the podcasting world, it's vital to have an open-source alternative to proprietary distribution networks.
Zagorath|5 months ago
I appreciate that. I hope you do. But I do not for one second believe the truth of it. If it were true, you wouldn't have been having customer service respond to people complaining about this by trying to hock a paid subscription. In both emails and in your forums.
This is not a bug in the technical sense. At best, it is choosing to walk back a policy after pushback.
> we have honored the legacy people who paid a one-time fee to Pocket Casts when they were a startup with basically what we call a "Champions" account
This is, as of now, factually untrue. Only those who paid for the web version get that. It should have been for everyone, and hopefully now you will apply it to everyone. But when you first announced paid subscriptions you were very clear: those who paid for the web version get premium for free. And even that was only done because the web version was being locked behind premium, and only after pushback for your first plan of giving them one year free.
For those of us who bought the app on iOS and Android, the promise of "pay once, use forever" was broken a long time ago. It is only because the features being granted by that paid version were not actually very appealing that it didn't become much of an issue before now.
By adding ads into a product people paid for (your customer service representatives are lying in your forums by saying it's a "free product"), you've crossed a line. The answer now is to make sure those of us who paid for your app (not once, but twice) get the full version of it, just like the advertising promised us when we bought it.
pavo-etc|5 months ago
Appreciate you being public in places like this. I sent a similar message to Pocketcasts support but received an AI that seems to disagree with your comment here.
na2rboy|5 months ago
fullstop|5 months ago
This is not true for people, like me, who only bought the Android version. We were not tagged with "Champion", but this was stated: "you’ll still have access to the mobile app features you paid for".
This was in the description of the app at the time:
"There are many more powerful, straight forward features help you make Pocket Casts yours and in case you were wondering, here’s what Pocket Casts DOESN’T have: ads, episode limits, pushy trials, feature bloat or plugins.
It. Just. Works."
Now I have ads, and when I try to dismiss them I am greeted with a pushy sales pitch for a subscription.
Life is too short for this, and I've moved on to another app. But perhaps this is insightful as to why some users are frustrated and upset.
jason217|5 months ago
A thread was also pointing out in the google support forums for another app that did the same thing, ignoring a no-ads purchase and forcing a new subscription, and google asked to report the app from the store as this violates their terms of service
eamon0989|5 months ago
photomatt|5 months ago
dallen33|5 months ago
3bZ7nJ-XU_x8|5 months ago
mtoner23|5 months ago
rbits|5 months ago
I used to subscribe to PocketCasts Plus, but I stopped when they raised the price. It's so expensive.
vachina|5 months ago
__rito__|5 months ago
I use it every day. It's smooth, seamless, and FOSS.
Note that I am just a user, and not otherwise linked with them.
[0]: https://antennapod.org
dcchambers|5 months ago
Caveat: I *only* listen to Podcasts on my phone so I don't have to think about syncing library/status between devices.
xnx|5 months ago
davidshepherd7|5 months ago
subarctic|5 months ago
_DeadFred_|5 months ago
To be fair, in Star Trek you will see them carrying around like 3-4 data tablets, so even our broken enshittified tech works in a way Star Trek future predictors thought would be high tech.
DanOpcode|5 months ago
mantra2|5 months ago
exikyut|5 months ago
UmGuys|5 months ago
They should be forced to publish a new APK with a different name to change monetization strategies or honor what people paid for. This is fraud and theft.
doubley2|5 months ago
The argument on a "lifetime subscription" also does not really apply here. The app was a one-time purchase and then made free somewhere in 2019. Their logic was that early app purchasers would still receive the same set of features when the app was made free and a subscription was introduced. Source https://support.pocketcasts.com/knowledge-base/lifetime-acce...
Basically, purchasers didn't lose any features in 2019 onwards. The purchase was also for the entire app, not just an ad-free version, as there were no ads to begin with.
johanyc|5 months ago
WD-42|5 months ago
NaOH|5 months ago
Most beneficial for me is its customizations that can be applied to all shows or configured for individual shows. For example, all episodes for all shows can be set to play at 1¼x speed, but one show could be set to play at 1x speed. For me, the interview format can be at the faster speed, but the music podcast is better at regular speed. Similarly, users could set all shows' episodes to start at the 30-second mark because of, say, opening ads, but a specific show could be set to start at a different time because its opening is unlike the others.
I listen to enough shows that these configuration options make the app great for me. It's been a long time since I tried alternatives, but none of them ever stuck for more than (at most) a few days because the presentation or lack of customizations were less satisfying or convenient.
Truthfully, just writing this has compelled me to give the developer another in-app tip. It's been years since I did that and I must average at least 20 hours of use a week.
hutattedonmyarm|5 months ago
ghqst|5 months ago
tmaly|5 months ago
I switched over to Spotify. The only gripe I have with Spotify is when my phone encounters a dead spot, Spotify puts up a modal "You're offline" and loses my place in the podcast.
johanyc|5 months ago
zmmmmm|5 months ago
To be clear, it's not just that they added ads, but they are obnoxiously in the main active screen while things are playing. Made me also disrespect Automattic as well as this seems very poor behaviour on their part.
winkelwagen|5 months ago
Did I expect free updates and features forever. No, Only the bare minimum to keep it running.
Hell, if it was owned by a small company or an individual I wouldn’t mind donating to keep it maintained once in a while. I don’t feel the need for a subscription for a podcast app. The fanciest feature I’ve used in the past 10 years is the sleep after 15 min options.
Saddest is that they are advertising their own apps. Good to know which one to avoid.
donatj|5 months ago
Are they rehosting all the audio and that's bandwidth costs? Even then it seemed high.
mgrandl|5 months ago
zmmmmm|5 months ago
lycopodiopsida|5 months ago
I am sympathetic with author, but unfortunately it is also one, if not the best podcast app technically. It has this 0-bullshit UI which does what you expect without enforcing some maddening organization patterns (Castro) of fancy UI with hilarious amount of bugs (looking at you, Overcast).
It has the "mark as played" button, also in car play.
It is the only one I've found capable to pull the episode on Apple Watch over network, instead of relying on pre-caching from phone app.
I would be very sad if PocketCasts goes out of business.
P.S.: I checked and it seems that Overcast also has cellular streaming on AW - I need to test it again.
grimblee|5 months ago
hbn|5 months ago
They do have a few online features they run, like syncing your subscribed podcasts and listening progress and whatnot, and I think they have their own index of RSS links for searching, but nothing compared to streaming audio.
Anyway, as of today they backtracked on showing ads to people who purchased the app before it went free. I guess they're claiming it was a bug, which I don't really believe but I don't care as long as they undid making the app ugly.
alanfranz|5 months ago
Give me a good 3y or 5y deal, then we're friends.
g-technology|5 months ago
Any Suggestions for iPhone that I can easily move to from pocketcast?
nba456_|5 months ago
dcreater|5 months ago
subarctic|5 months ago
rmunn|5 months ago
I'm also not a huge fan of the way hovering over the link turns it into a highlight on the word, but that's not a huge readability issue because the highlight covers the entire character. But having the non-hovered link underline be fat, so that it partially overlaps the baseline of the characters, means that those characters are superimposed on two different backgrounds, pale blue and pale red, and that harms readability.
This site isn't the only one that does this, or I might not be complaining. It's a style that seems to be popular, and I really don't know why. It's a bad idea and people should stop doing it.
climb_stealth|5 months ago
doubley2|5 months ago
[deleted]
forrestthewoods|5 months ago
You know. I approve the pushback on enshitification. But there’s something weird about righteous fury over an app which literally costs money to run didn’t provide free updates for literally decades on what probably cost like $5.
I dunno. It just kinda rubs me the wrong way.
danpalmer|5 months ago
The company is stuck in a bad place where the most loyal users, probably those getting the most value out of it in the long run, aren't paying for it. Subscriptions for newer users are one way, or trying to upsell existing users, but this subscription is exceptionally expensive for what it is, and they can only monetise the non-standard feature set.
I'd like to see a return to versioned software. Call Pocket Casts done, fork it, release Pocket Casts 2 for $20 with all these features. Next year release Pocket Casts 3 for another $20. People can update or not, up to them.
nimih|5 months ago
I don't personally have the "righteous fury" of the article's author (I'm more just annoyed and disappointed that a nice thing I liked is now noticeably less nice, for complex social and economic reasons outside any one person's control), but I can certainly understand why a person would be mad enough to fork a repo and write a couple hundred words in a blog post.
rbits|5 months ago
bigfishrunning|5 months ago
zmmmmm|5 months ago
However instead they took the existing app and vandalised it, abusing the user's privacy and invading their eyeballs.
scarface_74|5 months ago
You get very little extra for the $15/year subscription fee. That’s not a complaint. You get all of the features that most people care about in the Fred version.
It’s available for the iPhones, iPads and the web with full CarPlay support and it syncs podcasts to the Apple Watch.
He did learn from his mistake of making Instapaper a one time payment and sold it.
For those who don’t know, he was the cofounder of Tumblr.
photomatt|5 months ago