Indie Podcast Apps Not Growing
Independent podcast apps are not growing as a category. This is not a particular secret, but perhaps you haven’t seen it stated explicitly. It’s the sort of thing that has to be inferred, but there’s plenty of available data if you look for it. While the podcasting sector has seen growth, this has occurred almost entirely on platforms like YouTube, and the independent podcast app userbase has mostly just stood still.
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I’m sure somewhere out there a 21-year-old just downloaded Castro or Pocket Casts for the first time and thinks RSS feeds are awesome (if you are this person, please email me). But every number I can see indicates the userbase is both static and aging. Every new customer I talk to has used some combination of Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or Castro for at least the last 5 years if not the last 10.
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Perhaps there are healthy businesses that get very few new users but instead gracefully age with the ones they have. Ferrari maybe? Buddy, smartphone apps are not one of those businesses.
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I would rather work on flashy features to capture new users, but, reality being what it is, I have to think about things in terms of both the health of the ecosystem and what will actually help retain existing podcast app users.
Anil Dash wrote, in 2014, that the simple phrase wherever you get your podcasts is a “radical statement”:
[…] Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that’s supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that’s not owned by any one company, that can’t be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.
Video podcasting changes that. In its simplest form, it is just a YouTube channel, which means it is siloed and controlled by Google. Spotify also supports video but only in its app.
So Marco described a problem. What if someone manually asks to download an episode when they already have three downloaded? You can’t just immediately delete it to keep things tidy. So what do you do? Marco added a special hidden “episode downloaded manually” flag to the database, so those episodes would not count towards the limit.
This is one more example of how even the most seemingly trivial features require thinking through and accounting for different cases that may not be obvious at first glance. Every user interface designer and product designer should collect and absorb examples like this.
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Finally, Marco’s wife Tiff suggests a solution to all the problems: just don’t let users download more episodes, she said, and show them a message, roughly: “Your episode limit is three, but this would be the fourth, denied”.
Marco liked the solution. I didn’t. Sure, it solves Marco’s problems, but not the user’s.
Birman presents this as “Let me click,” but I wanted to offer two alternative/complementary principles that helped me before:
- Let me do things in any order. Here’s Google Home app, where I can change the temperature and the time for holding – but if I change the time first, it frustratingly resets when I subsequently change the temperature. It forces one specific order in an interface that suggests any order is okay[…]
- The current action has the most momentum. The user is right there, active, tapping on things, wanting to get stuff done. If Overcast indeed throws a “your episode limit is three” message, then it forces the user to remember how to get to the settings and change it. The momentum is lost. The decisions of past me should not be as important as the decisions of present me.
FWIW, the entire strict-limit feature is gone in the pending update (awaiting App Store review). EVERYONE hated it.
Now I’m just displaying the added-manually status in the UI and allowing it to be toggled manually in the “…” menu.
I’ve needed to evolve my expectations for what my role in Overcast is.
After building up a large, passionate userbase over a very long time, it’s not really entirely mine anymore. I can’t just do whatever I want with it.
And the growth era of open/RSS/indie/whatever podcast apps is over. The business is now about serving and retaining my existing customers for as long as possible.
So I can add things here and there, very carefully, but I can’t really change anything significant.
Previously:
- Castro’s Customer Support Lessons
- Overcast Transcripts
- Official Overcast Reddit
- Apple Podcasts on the Web
- Google Podcasts Is Gone
- Spotify Now #1 Podcasts Platform
- iTunes Podcast Directory Now Hiding Feed URLs
- Joe Rogan Moves to Spotify
- Overcast Rejected for Listing Competing Podcast Apps
17 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I host or co-host a few audio-only podcasts, and have been podcasting for 15 years or so. One podcast that I have been hosting for 5+ years is about an app that is available for Mac and Windows, with about an even split between platforms. I just looked at the stats for user agents, and Apple Podcasts is about 54%, Overcast 13%, Other 9%, Safari 6% (listeners play the episode from the website), then Chrome, Pocket Casts, Firefox, Podcast Addict, iTunes (Windows, presumably), and Downcast.
I don't know how indicative this is of overall podcast app usage, but anything other than Apple Podcasts and Overcast is in the low single figures.
With the Apple Podcasts juggernaut, it's not easy to compete. Also, many people listen to podcasts on YouTube now; this one has a couple hundred listens for each episode, and 100-200 on Spotify.
It feels like the number of ads in audio podcasts has increased such that I've moved onto mainly listening to YouTube podcasts (although still mostly listen to audio portion while driving). Granted I have a YouTube Premium account. When I am out of YouTube podcasts, I use Pocket Cast to listen to audio podcasts.
Interesting post.
-- I purchased Overcast back in version 1.x days. Didn't like it.I feel podcast "archiving" is a user choice. I mean, does any browser limit you to (1) open tabs, (2) the amount of bookmarks, or even (3) any kind of lock in? I found the app too restrictive. I always thought podcasts are audio only, but that's me. Let ME manage what I prefer downloading what I want.
-- OTOH, every time I have an OS dot-release (sometimes even a dot-dot one) I need to find memory for my iPhone 12 mini. Guess what that the price I pay for having management control on storage for podcasts, which is usually the first place I go to. (I only have one home screen and it has 2 folders... one for my apps and one for games. Used to have another called "iOS Crap" but it's been gone for a while.
-- Marco made several design choices, including (1) hosting podcasts and (2) limiting downloads. That seems like the actual issue. Not the App Store, nor cost, nor anything not related to what I would call "developer choices". However else he may phrase things - including his recent choices of going public - it was his choice.
-- "It feels like the number of ads in audio podcasts has increased such that I've moved onto mainly listening to YouTube podcasts". I've been (in the last 4 days) finding that virtually ANY video I watch from YT to be bombarded with ads. I'm talking about 30 second ads (skippable after about 5 seconds for most) every 30 seconds. Cannot speak about "watching" a podcast, but really, is that what you "listen" to while "driving"? Just saying....
-- "...wherever you get your podcasts..." This is just one piece of what I call shorthand for "... if we can figure out how to steer you to a way where we can make more profit for us...". How much is Apple, YouTube, even Overcast making from this already? (I'm looking at you Spotify.)
I'm feeling very old right now... at least 2 generations behind what is going on. Really? People LISTEN to an audio only-podcast on YouTube? The video for said podcast episode... is it the host(s) and guest(s) sitting in front of microphones talking to each other? At least some CNN or talk radio shows would take phone-in callers.
@Dave I’m not sure what you mean about design choices. What does “hosting podcasts” refer to? It seems to me that you have full control over downloads: you can choose to download automatically or manually and choose to limit or not limit.
The simple fact is no one is doing a good all-device solution, that:
- Only requires a single download on one device (Mac).
- Allows your Mac to be the (your choice of folder) archive location.
- Transfers episodes to your iOS device directly from your Mac.
- Doesn't spy on you under the guise of "discovery services for podcasts".
- Doesn't have an unethical (subscription) business model.
Apple's Podcasts app?
- On the Mac it stores shows on the boot drive only, in obfuscated directory structures.
- It ALWAYS spies on you, even if you don't subscribe to any shows via Apple's directories.
- It ALWAYS spies on you, even if you disable iCloud Sync.
- IT ALWAYS SPIES ON YOU, and uploads your on-device episode metadata to Apple, and downloads replacement album art for shows from Apple's servers, based ONLY on the ID3 Aritst tags.
I had a least one audio developer, who had a very nice program that replicated the original iOS iPod app state "I think Marco has that covered" when I asked him if he could replicate the original Podcast app - Marco is a BIG problem in independent podcast apps. He basically sucks the oxygen out of the room with his freemason-like darling-of-the-scene influence network, so people defer to him, rather than compete, because they figure there's nothing left to build a business upon.
TLDR Podcasting isn't growing because everyone, at every level in the industry is dodgy in some way. Everyone wants to be a tollbooth, wants to use pre-recorded (non-host, geolocated, metrics derived) ads, and no one will deliver a solution as good as the iTunes and pre-version 6 Podcasts iOS app / iPod Classic podcasts experience.
Oh and lets not forget the podcast "networks" who think their shows are worth *per month* what Amazon Prime Video costs in almost a year.
And the final reason... people who don't provide a RSS link for their shows, and as @Dave states, "wherever you get your podcasts (but not direct from us)".
I love Downcast precisely because it doesn't impose silly benevolent limitations on you by default; there's a Download All button right there if you need it. Trouble is, the app isn't getting much maintenance and is showing its age. And it doesn't interop with Windows, obviously. I only moved to it because Apple Podcast got into the spying game; before then, and with iTunes, it was great. I'm now testing a successor to Downcast called Simulcast by a blind developer, which is bristling with functionality including support for AudioBookshelf, so we may soon hope to have a solution to all our little problems. Testflight is sadly full up ATM, but I'm using it now and can't wait for the release. The trouble is going to be migrating my Downcast library, since it (and all other iOS apps) store everything in the sandbox.
If you have customers, and you want to keep any of them, the app has _never_ been "yours" to do whatever. Crazy sentiment, imo.
@Someone @Sebby Yeah, I’d like to see more in the archiving space. I use Overcast on my phone and Downcast on my Mac to make an archive. I wish I could drive the phone app from the content on my Mac. (I do, to an extent, via Overcast’s Uploads feature, but it’s limited.) Unfortunately, Downcast itself can’t serve as an archive. It falls down after a month or two of episodes due to problems with Security Scoped Bookmarks, so I have to offload the older files (to EagleFiler). And it’s long had a horrible memory leak so that I have to quit and relaunch it multiple times per day or it will use all the RAM on my Mac.
@mjtsai I use Doughnut on the Mac to listen, and (auto) download, then I have Hazel workflows that copy the contents of the Doughnut folders when they arrive for each show to a different structured location on the same drive, that's the proper archive (this keeps the archive airgapped from the podcatcher).
Since they're on the same drive, the copy doesn't use extra disk space, thanks to APFS. The Doughnut downloads directory is excluded from Time Machine backups.
For listening on mobile, I'm using Apple's app, and copying files to it with iMazing, which is how I discovered Apple's app uploads the metadata of the episode to Apple, and downloads Apple's copy of the album art, which it uses instead of whatever the podcast creators embedded in the file.
Said Michael: "[Downcast] falls down after a month or two of episodes due to problems with Security Scoped Bookmarks...."
Could someone explain in lay terms what this means?
I restarted Downcast this morning, and it was fine in the afternoon, but when I got back from dinner my whole Mac was frozen because it had used 247 GB of RAM. I guess that’s all the free space that I had. There are about 600 GB of Time Machine snapshots, but it didn’t automatically purge them.
@NaOH Downcast is in the Mac App Store, so it has to be sandboxed. Sandboxed apps need to acquire access to files in a special way, and there’s a longstanding bug/limitation in macOS where only a 4-digit number of such references (SSBs) can be created for the lifetime of the app. The limitation may even apply if the app tells macOS that it’s done with files and closes them. After that, macOS will just start returning errors, and the app can’t do anything. (I think there is also a bug in Downcast in that it seems to be using SSBs even for files in its own container where that shouldn’t be necessary.)
Thank you for explaining that, Michael. I have Mac Downcast but only use iOS Downcast because multi-device syncing seemed to cause issues, largely the played/unplayed feed list not properly matching across devices.
Even using Downcast on just one iOS device, a 12 mini that’s now akin to an iPod Touch, I have issues—downloaded episodes getting undownloaded, episodes marked for streaming moving to deleted, unsubscribed shows returning, etc. I was hoping what you’d initially described would help me understand what I’ve faced. Looking forward to the Simulcast app that Sebby mentioned and fingers crossed it’s a suitable replacement for me.
@Michael and @NaOH Yes, unfortunately Downcast is still using iCloud Documents to sync its database instead of CloudKit, so it's trivial to lose sync state. As you've worked out, the solution is just to disable/not use iCloud syncing. Goose-stepping to avoid corruption is possible but really hard in practice, because it's very easy to start playback and invalidate your sync data/cause a conflict. Downcast is a dear old app and it's given me great service, but as soon as I can completely transition to Simulcast I'm doing that. It has explicit support for exporting all your sync data and media files, which is the major irritation of Downcast (and most other apps).
Seriously, if any of you folks have the programming chops, Doughnut is GPL opensource, written in Swift, and just crying out for a bit of attention (it has literally no Help documentation, and the project's "maintainer" doesn't respond on Github), and maybe a port to iOS (and you could do local wifi sync the way Doppler does, if you really wanted to *hint*).
@Jim. Well said. IMHO Tim Cook's Apple has done everything they can to extract as much revenue from the indie market as possible, while simultaneously crushing it. Not to mention that in the Podcast market, Apple competes and has been caught using dark tactics to boost their app ranking on the #1 App Store on their platforms.
IMHO, the best podcast app is one that I initially subscribed to for other reasons: Sofa (https://www.sofahq.com/play). I initially subscribed to Sofa to track books, movies, etc. based on the review on Daring Fireball: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/15/sofa-5. But Sofa actually turned out to be the best podcast app I've used.
One really standout feature is the ability to listen to a podcast as a series, starting from the first episode and moving forward, with subsequent episodes downloaded and queued in order. That makes it a lot easier to listen to serial publications where it is important to listen to the episodes in order.
