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Comment by synchronise | Hacker News Reader

I've never seen the appeal of Pocket Casts or these almost-a-service podcast apps.

I've been using Antennapod for over a year now and it a great podcast app and does a lot of stuff the paid ones won't even do, including syncing what episodes I've listened to to gpodder.net, searching iTunes and other websites and just having an easy to use, simple UI.

It's just a shame that these FOSS apps which have much lower overheads as well, just can't market themselves as a commercial proprietary application like Pocket Casts can.

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The server side crawling in Pocket Casts means it's always instantly up to date with my 50+ feeds, and perfectly synced with its web client. Seems like a full service to me.

Also in my experience, relying on small-scale FOSS apps means opening myself to the vagaries of their on/off development cycles, dealing with their underinvestment in design, and the impossibility of them spending significant resources on good old fashioned centralized backends. Of course FOSS apps have many strengths of their own (esp. in the desktop content/code creation category), but the apps on my phone are "lifestyle" - I want them to be rock solid, aesthetically pleasing, to require zero thought, and to respect my privacy, and I'll happily pay good money for that, which is something I think in this day and age should be encouraged. FOSS apps are simply a different value proposition.

> and to respect my privacy, and I'll happily pay good money for that

That's the issue for me. If it's proprietary, I simply don't trust it to keep my data secure. I have no way of knowing that myself.

And that's the great thing about gpodder too, you can host your own instance of it so you are in total control of your services.

That's why we have permission APIs at the OS level. Better than nothing. Also you say you only trust foss software to not only not maliciously spy on you but too keep your data secure. Do you really check the code for security flaws or run automated analysis tools on it?

You are describing the exact same use-case as other people are using the apps for. Antennapod + gpodder.net is your podcast-as-a-service solution, where other people are using Pocket Casts.

You mainly seem to rail against people preferring a commercial solution over a FOSS solution. The reason for that is simple, people don't care about the difference and Pocket Casts provides a better user experience that just works instead of having to cobble different parts together yourself.

I just want a solution that I know is FOSS, secure and won't use my data for analytics. I have no way of knowing that from a proprietary application so it doesn't fit my use case.

Find me an open source app that I can use on iOS, Android & the web, and sync my subscriptions and play state between them, and I’ll be glad to have a look. Until then I am very happy to pay fine developers such as these a tiny sum for their craft.

Antennapod and gpodder will work for the web and Android, I don't own an iOS device so I don't know of any solutions for that platform unfortunately.

To add to that, there are issues between the GPL and the Apple App Store ToS so open source apps on that platform are at a disadvantage as a result.

If the owner of the code is publishing my the app, there is no problem as they just own the code and aren’t using it under any license and aren’t bound by the GPL. Similarly an owner of GPL code can relicense it for use on the App Store. Not ideal, but it can be workable.

But that's not the case most of the time. Many apps aren't just one man operations, they pull in contributions from other authors and if it is GPL in any way, it becomes a mess to change that after the fact.

Wait, is pocketcasts supposed to sync desktop with mobile app? When I tried the desktop app it didn't do that.

I've had good success with the beta web client

If you mean the web interface, that synced perfectly with the Android app for me for years, but it seemed like it stopped syncing properly sometime last month? (Is there a proper desktop app? I'd prefer that to the using my browser.)

It does for me, but not continuously flawless. I sometimes have to close and re-open the mobile app before it skips to where I left off on the desktop app.

"It does everything I want"

For other people there it is; there's the appeal. It does everything they want.

Podcast players without server-side crawling can get really annoying when you're subscribed to more than just a handful of feeds.

When I was using Downcast on iOS refreshing all feeds took ages and a lot of traffic (some feeds with a lot of episodes can be more than 500 kB, that adds up when you're subscribed to 50 feeds) and since the refresh wasn't even threaded all it took was a single slow server to block the whole refresh.

Now in Overcast (which does server-side crawling) the refresh is instant and I can even get immediate notifications about new episodes.

I used to be rage against the serverside ("ugh it takes so long to refresh when I know there's an episode out!") until I realised that of my 20 or so podcasts I subscribe to almost all 20 of them have their entire back catalogue in their RSS feed

Serverside crawling means your app just needs to grab whatever's different instead of downloading 20 RSS feeds every few minutes/hours. Definitely a bandwidth saver

I did use antennapod and compared it to pocketcasts. Antennapod provided chapter support much earlier and for more file formats. But the main feature of PocketCasts is that the server syncs the feeds for you. The app instantly knows if something new arrives, but you download from the normal servers like in antennapod. Overall what antennapod lacked is the dedicated focus on quality which PocketCasts provides. It just always worked. Always. Antennapod crashed for me. Often times. And I am on the PocketCasts beta and nothing is amiss. On antennapod beta should be called an alpha, and even the normal client has its problems. The UI ux is also much worse. U intuitive. A few sprinkles of color would also be great and make it easier to navigate and set everything up. So yeah. Definitely PocketCasts. I would also love to use the desktop/browser version but the paid subscription for it wasn't even worth it for me. My smartphone is enough for that. And also it is a paid app. Support all the devs. Best 5 bucks spend on a podcatcher yet.

Everything you listed is something pocket casts does very well. And it doesn't have any overhead as far as I can see.

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