>My podcasts arrive using a different app with the backing of the RSS standard, not Spotify's internal standard.
I know a lot of people will disagree, but I think Spotify did a good job of handling the problem of "premium" podcasts.
There's no way to make a "premium" podcast (one you charge people to access) that is fully compatible with the original open vision of podcasting. You can either pervert the original RSS enclosures system by using obscure / personalized URLs for individual subscribers (a leaky abstraction that both discourages open sharing of feed URLs and fails to properly close off access) or you can pervert it by wrapping files in DRM (Apple's approach in the Apple Podcasters Program).
Instead of perverting the RSS feeds, Spotify opted to pervert (slightly) the term "podcast" to not strictly mean "in an RSS feed and listenable on any client." I think this was inevitable and arguably had already happened and is far better than corrupting the open ecosystem. It also happens to be far easier from a UX perspective to tell someone to just use the Spotify app.
For all the people upset at Spotify, consider the counterfactual: Why would they tell people to listen to their premium podcasts by copying a custom premium URL and pasting it into some random client (which 99% of the time on iPhones will be controlled by their bully Apple)? It is much clearer, easier for the user, and better for Spotify's premium creators (who don't want to lose listeners to a complex setup system) to just tell them "Listen to Spotify podcasts by downloading the Spotify app".
Under Spotify's system, some podcasters rake in Spotify money they wouldn't otherwise get, growing the premium ecosystem, while the open ecosystem remains robust and not polluted with more DRM and URL hacks. Keeping closed systems clearly closed and separate is much better IMO than trying to awkwardly jam it into the open ecosystem, undermining what makes that ecosystem great.