Indie Podcast Apps Not Growing

Dustin Bluck:

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

Nick Heer:

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.

Ilya Birman:

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.

[…]

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.

Marcin Wichary:

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.

Marco Arment:

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.

Marco Arment:

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

Business Castro Design Indie Development iOS iOS 26 iOS App Overcast Podcasts Spotify Storage Video YouTube

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