Pocket Casts, you altered the deal, so I will alter your app | Hacker News Reader

Pocket Casts, you altered the deal, so I will alter your app

blog.matthewbrunelle.com

127 pointsruph123143 comments

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.

Automattic are struggling business ?

> why does the author here feel so entitled

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.

I hope you never hear about free refills that they have in some restaurants.

You're demanding more than a decade of free app updates for a small sum you paid ages ago. Why can't you instead be happy with all the value you got from the app? We aren't born to be small minded and stingy, look up to greater goals and a greater attitude in life. We only have so many years before it is cut from us.

>You're demanding more than a decade of free app updates for a small sum you paid ages ago.

I mean... that was the agreement between both parties. Really not that hard to grasp.

So how about those free refills at McDonalds? Clearly you have the right to return there every day for the rest of your life and fill up hundreds of cups each time. After all, it is in the agreement between both parties, so go for it!

That's an apples and oranges comparison.

While the timeline isn't explicitly stated, free refills are implied that it's for the duration of your visit. In fact you can see the implication given that's how it's used most of the time.

Telling someone they'll get "lifetime" access for a one-time payment is not the same.

In fact, if I was told I had purchased lifetime free refills, I would expect I could obtain a refill during any visit without purchase.

Where does it say that the refills are not for your lifetime? Now go get that soda which is rightfully yours!

There's a free refill policy at Starbucks too, but it specifically states the constraints, which I used the hell out of for years, and is just part of the deal. It's advantageous in a number of different ways for them, but if it wasn't they can take that out of the contract. Worth noting that it still remains despite lackluster and varying performance in the market; their milk sales would compensate anyway.

"Free refill(s) of hot or iced brewed coffee and tea. Starbucks Rewards members may receive free refills of hot or iced brewed coffee or tea during the same day in store visit at participating Starbucks stores (excludes Cold Brew and Nitro Cold Brew, Iced Tea Lemonade, Flavored Iced Tea, and Starbucks Refreshers® base). To be eligible for free refill(s) of hot or iced brewed coffee or tea, your initial order must be served in for-here ware or a clean reusable cup."

The app updates aren’t free, I paid for them with my lifetime subscription.

They could do what other apps have done and release a new SKU for a new business model or with a new feature set that justifies asking for more money. Reeder has done this, for example.

I think JetBrains has one of the most fair and honest subscription schemes where you pay for a subscription but when you stop paying you’re free to keep using the last major version that released while you were subscribed. I think that’s much harder to do on mobile app stores, though.

But you can still use the app you paid for during the rest of your life. Nobody is forcing you to do updates to your phone, certainly Pocket Cast aren't forcing you to update your phone.

>But you can still use the app...

If we're doing "but"s...

But the original agreement was for updates for a lifetime. Of course people are going to be upset if they were promised one thing and ended up getting something else.

They didn't warn us ahead of time that there would be ads. The patch notes didn't even mention the ads! Shifty Jelly used to have legendary patch notes, but it's been a long time since that was true. And since app stores don't actually let you downgrade to a previous version, your comment is simply untrue.

I think apple and google should allow us to disable updates to certain apps.

I have updates disabled on my Android phone. Every couple of weeks I go through and update what I want.

But yes I don't think you can disable updates only for particular apps.

Anyone who paid shouldn't see ads.

It's a life time membership, not a decade time membership. And OP is still alive.

Why they feel entitled to the thing they paid for is not hard to see. A good question is why an app that worked fine over a decade ago apparently still costs $800k per year to support.

> A good question is why an app that worked fine over a decade ago apparently still costs $800k per year to support

This is what I would like to know. Granted, Google makes it hard to be an app developer these days with constant requirements to update things just to stay compatible and compliant with all their requirements. But still - $800k a year is like 4 full time well paid staff. And that was their loss, so add all the revenue to that.

The real answer of course, is they aren't just maintaining the app as is, they are trying to push all sorts of new features into it and this is what's costing them. But why should previous users be paying for that?

Total Commander has done free updates for 31 years

Except those are not even close to the same type of software to fairly compare. A file manager has virtually no inherent servicing costs to pay compared to a podcast player.

If someone tells me one thing and delivers another I am never going to default to "happy" and be quiet because I "should be thankful" for the deal I did get.

I don't know what world that failing to keep your word is OK, but just because an entity is a company doesn't give them a free pass. No matter how good the deal is.

To my knowledge reneging only applies when it's a voluntary decision. A company that has been sold by its previous owner for generating a 800k loss is not doing much of anything by choice. It's just fighting insolvency.

IANAL and I'm not making legal claims, if that's what you're getting at.

Just on the basis of fair expectations in the marketplace, if you say all you need is a fixed rate to serve me for the rest of time, then that's the deal. Anything short, insolvency or otherwise, is reneging. The mismanagement of the company is not my concern.

And before people hop on and make it sound like people with this expectation are naive for believing a company could offer this lifetime service for that fee, AntennaPod + gPodder.net provide the _exact same service_ for the low price of $0. I gave PocketCasts money, and somehow they turned that into -800K .

I don't know where this mentality that customers owe companies that fall short of their promises grace or understanding come from. When I fall short of my obligations to companies, collection agencies rather than thank you notes usually appear.

The company could also go bankrupt and shutdown. Lifetime subscriptions are nice but notice that in other real-world transactions say a "lifetime warranty" on a stove or whatever is defined as the expected lifetime of the device. I agree that "lifetime" is deceptive marketing, but it's not unusual marketing. It is a bit unusual perhaps that there isn't a defined term for the life of the software or service.

> but grandfathered in previous purchasers

If you bought the app only you weren't grandfathered into anything. You needed to have also bought the web player.

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.

`Is Automattic a struggling business?`

I mean, everytime I see someone talking about them on Twitter, they are clearly struggling with _something_.

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 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

We may need a law that regulates "lifetime" purchases. One part is standardised disclosure. The other is putting fees into a trust.

I don't think a trust should be necessary. A plan for longterm sustainability should be.

The streaming video service Nebula, for example, has a lifetime membership. The company was very straightforward with potential customers: this is not their best deal, it's explicitly meant for people who want to help support the company (or who prefer not to have ongoing subscription costs), and they are doing it as an alternative to seeking outside investment money. The money they raise won't go into a trust, but into expanding the business in the same way a company might if it went to seek venture capital.

At the time I signed up for it, it cost roughly 10 years' worth of subscriptions.

> as a business offering a lifetime membership

> If the bank refused to return the money I loaned them, I would rightfully be very upset.

Everyone who bought the app STILL have access to the app. All features they paid for are still available (except if you consider no ad a feature).

The "correct" way to do it is change current app to classic and release a new app but that's quite cumbersome. I would like Apple or Google to offer an option to provide paid upgrade options.

When I bought the app they specifically listed "No Ads!" as one of the selling points.

Which is why I said this specific case is a bit of a grey area (that and the fact that the lifetime membership was initially offered after moving the app to a freemium). I was speaking to general practice of offering lifetime memberships.

But yes, I do consider no ads to be a feature. My attention is valuable

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.

The one time fee doesn't pay for your ongoing costs, but it does pay for your upfront costs. The trick is to either get other users to pay for your ongoing costs, or to reduce ongoing costs and stop further development.

I suppose you're right, but you have to be very quick in the latter case to fully extract your portion of the surplus or you're just yielding it to a copycat that does the subscription model.

One time cost per major version is sustainable, you won't get Silicon Valley rich on it, but you can make a living.

Lifetime licenses only work in the beginning when you have people buying them at regular intervals, at some point the market is saturated and you need to have a subscription model.

Case in point: Unraid. I have two grandfathered "forever" licenses and I'll never need a third.

Yes, the thing with one time purchase is that it should be as it is, right now. Not including updates and support forever.

By this standard, people should feel entitled to get an update on their fridge whenever a new compressor technology is available (or whatever, you get the point).

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.

If people/companies want to support a thing they think should exist, it is their sacrifice to keep it alive. I don't think as them being stupid.

For the concerns of contracts, you are not alone on the suffering side. Alltogether humanity elevated tolerance to this level, this is not a surprise.

> If you don't honor contracts, then you should go out of business

We're talking about Automattic. It's virtually their business model.

I don't think they owned Pocket casts all the way back then...

Well, does anyone actually have a copy of the contract from 14 years ago? Usually there are clauses hedging against this kind of thing.

Example: I recently wrote the T&S for my Finnish dictionary app (still working on it), and I make it clear in advance that the license was a one time fee for perpetual use for that major version. [1]

I can do this because the app is almost entirely offline, and because for the parts that are, smart cloud infra decisions means my recurring infra costs are low. If I add in features which imply a bespoke server down the line, of course that would probably be a major version upgrade - and a change in the pricing model to boot. But I'd still keep the old v1 stuff up for the lifers.

[1]: https://taskusanakirja.com/terms-of-service/#91-pricing-and-...

IIRC they advertised themselves as "pay once, use forever" in their marketing. So why shouldn't they uphold that?

An advertisement is not a contract, unfortunately. If we're going to talk legal, we need to talk in legalese.

They are (or were, at the time they had that slogan) an Australian company. I am an Australian citizen. Under Australian Consumer Law, an advertisement is absolutely legally binding.

https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/advertising-and-promotions...

So if an Australian ad tells something is "the best" or something similar and you can prove it isn't, you can get your money back?

The link I shared makes it quite clear that "puffery" that nobody is reasonably expected to take literally does not count.

Being told that the app you paid for would be a one-time payment, and then having the service deliberately degraded to try and force you into a subscription model, is clearly not puffery.

Usually subjective opinion isn't binding (though I'm sure there are exceptions to this across jurisdictions)

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!"

You will renege on a contract if it’s inconvenient to honor it? Good to know.

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”

Back in the day, Pepsi had an ads that claim you can win a Jet fighter if you do xxx. A guy did xxx and tried to get the Jet, but of course he couldn't and sue them. The court let Pepsi win.

So, "a place where a business is held to their word" has never been existed.

But it should exist. This is blatantly false advertising. Of course a jet fighter is a ridiculous thing to promise, but it's still a promise they chose to make. Why make a promise they never intend to keep? That sort of thing should be struck down hard by the courts.

But a life time membership is not an unreasonable promise.

People employ hyperbole all the time, so why can’t a company?

But you’re right, a lifetime membership should really be for a lifetime. But since nobody is suing over it, then it’ll continue to be abused.

What is PocketCasts maintaining?

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.

We don't disclose Pocket Casts revenue directly, but we invest $millions a year in its development and hosting. It gets very broad usage and has over ten million of listening hours a week. There are clients maintained and new features developed for iPhone, iPad, MacOS, Apple Watch, Android Phones and Tablets, and an open web version.

I don't understand why you went with a single licence valid for all platforms. Clearly each client is a different product on each platform, even if it might have the same core functionality.

I don't know what the original price was and I understand why he is mad, but that was a poor business decision. If you overpromise that's kind of on you, plenty of companies have been burned by such behavior.

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.

> why does the author here feel so entitled

Because they paid for it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That might be a bug, thank you for purchasing back in 2016, we acquired it in 2018 and open sourced it in 2022. Send me your account info and I'll get it tagged properly.

> 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.

The product has had several different owners over the years. I can't speak for all of them, but we're trying to do right by people now. If you send me your account info, I'm happy to upgrade it.

You want to do right by people? Then put a big notice in the app, on your website, in the forums, etc., and refund subscriptions for anyone who's paid based on previously faulty information. If you're having folks to reach out to you over HN where you'll manually upgrade their accounts and shrugging your shoulders at being double-paid, then this is more of a PR stunt than doing right.

Hey, I genuinely appreciate that. I thought that this subscription was added under Automattic's watch, but as you say it has been a confusing process so I could very well be wrong.

I've already reached out to your customer service via email including my account info, so if you could use that to get my account upgraded, I would be very grateful. I received a pretty swift response to my first enquiry, but your customer service representative on that occasion pretty much said "lol sucks to be you, maybe you should upgrade?" I considered this an incredibly unacceptable response, and said as much, again pretty quickly (all three initial emails went through within half an hour). It has been days since my second email and I have not received a reply. If you are, as you say, trying to do right by people now, your customer service does not seem to be on the same page as you.

There are also dozens of users in the same situation as me who have spoken up on Pocket Cast's official forums, and elsewhere on social media. It may be worth getting the customer service representatives on your forums on the same page as you, because so far they have been giving the same "lol, just upgrade" type response that I got in email. And getting someone to extend the same offer to users making the complaint on Reddit and other social media.

Please don't do it like this.

It wasn't a bug. Please, just say it. Give me closure. It'll be good for your karma. The adverts have been running all month and the 1* reviews on the app store and your forums would have made you aware of this 'defect'. Forum responses were initially to tell us to upgrade - and then they went silent. I presume you had some internal meetings.

Resolving this wouldn't have been hard, as due to it being open-sourced, we can see there's a debug flag to turn the adverts on and off: https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/podcasts-you-altered-the-de...

The Verge story came out on the 24th, and on the 25th suddenly the adverts vanished (on both beta and production channels simultaneously). Imagine me raising my eyebrow.

Unlike some of my fellow previously-paid users, I'd said I was OK with paying you more money. The app's lasted longer than most, I've used it nearly every day, and I want to make sure the maintainers get paid and you can keep the lights on. I think it's still the only app where I've raised a ticket to ask how to donate more money.

What's sent us all the the barricades though, is the tone-deaf way this was done - and it's continuing to happen. The adverts are gone, but I'm not feeling happy. This feels like remission at best. I'm suspecting you're not feeling deliriously cheerful over what the last month has achieved either.

My constructive thoughts are: 1) £40 is too much to pay each year for a podcast app. Nothing will work at this price. Look at Antennapod and justify anything you're charging for - it's what any your new users will be doing. 2) For people who paid to turn off the adverts forever, they need to have a way to have their adverts turned off turned off - so they'll need to be differentiated from the new users. 3) This doesn't mean I (and I assume others) don't want to pay you money though. Give me a way. Maybe every month, or 1000 minutes of playback just pop-up a "I hope your enjoying us, have you got a spare $10" message"? And if I click the little X, that message should instantly vanish/snooze. Annoyingly, this might have worked better before you'd torched the goodwill.

Well, this morning I noticed my account had been set to a premium one and the ads were gone. Thanks for getting the right thing done here.

> I appreciate that. I hope you do. But I do not for one second believe the truth of it.

Nor do I when I read passive-aggressive replies from Automattic on the Google Play store: "Hi Matthew! If you believe that your one-time payment entitles you to Plus access, which removes the ads, please reach out to us: [URL]. The banner ads help us sustain the app so we can continue making it available for free."

Talking outta both sides of your mouth, as usual. You’re a joke.

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."

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

> 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.

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.

sick thx

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.

Having peek at the feature set I cannot imagine how this to cost more then handful of subscriber of revenue to run~

They do not host any media -- The volume of post searching fulltext is so small single PSQL instance can take over -- your listening progress is a single integer ...

Reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

at least have cost of storing the media that Dropbox need pay. In this case there is none of that.

[[ I do understand there is a small distinction here, in that the Dropbox reference is for a user that will self host the storage server, but in the context of this message I refer to the SAAS host or owner of Pocket Casts I cannot imagine to be losing 800k a year even at AWS pricing given what the app does or something is written very wrong ... ]]

It is still true until today. Except it’s even more doable today with cheap storage and high bandwidth consumer internet.

Yeah, but they need money to pay for developers to enshittify the app.

This.

The app is virtually indifferent to what it looked like literally 4 years ago, apart from having some more rounded edges and some different animations. I know there will have been some required changes from Apple/Google, but it will not be a lot. Also, the sync is nice, but if the 5 MBs of metadata are so expensive why not change that to use GDrive/iCloud instead or allow to locally sync your progress?

The app and their service is not worth the extremely high cost of a mere podcast player which downloads data from external sources and plays it on my phone. I also paid for Pocket Casts Plus when it was ,99 or $2 (I don't remember) per month because I liked to upload my own podcast files, but since it was raised to idk 4$ I am not ready to pay anymore.

Cloud bills are no joke.

Since we are talking about podcasts, if you are looking for a podcast app for Android, use Antenna Pod [0].

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

This is a perfect replacement for me, thanks for recommending it.

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.

Antenna pod is great, but syncing play state between players (via gpodder) isn't as smooth as Pocket Casts.

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.

AntennaPod is great, that's what I used to use before I switched to iOS and then I found pocket casts as the closest replacement

Damn, he pulled a “Secure Custom Fields” on Automattic.

What's this in reference to? Sounds mildly interesting

They forked the open source project. ACF was forked as SCF.

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.

Apparently they consider "ad-free" a feature

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.

A lot of podcast apps have a server for crawling the RSS feeds for you.

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

price recently increased to $14.99

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.

do you have seperate queues for music and podcasts on spotify?

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.

There is also podcasts with dynamic ad slots that give me local ads in Pocket Casts

I generally detest vibe coding but this is really screaming out for someone to just let Claude loose for a day or two.

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.

Give me a good 3y or 5y deal, then we're friends.

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 site scans your ports

For those of us who dont want to build from source, is there an APK available of this version?

How would I do this on iOS?

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.

Agreed. I would not have realised they were links if I had not read your comment.

> 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.

I dunno. It just kinda rubs me the wrong way.

I don't think they're complaining about a lack of updates

There’s no universe in which people like this don’t complain.

Release Pocket Caste 2 and they’ll complain. Sub and they’ll complain. Don’t update and they’ll complain.

HN is highly sympathetic to the plight of the open source dev who rage quits because people demand too much for free. This is basically the same thing.

I know this will get downvotes. But I’m not wrong.

There are very obvious, important differences between the options they had available. Both in terms of general user expectations for end of life apps, as well as concrete promises made to their customers to make a sale.

Do you apply the same sort of lazy false equivalence to all moral and ethical questions? People will always complain, therefore you can do anything!

I don't think I've ever complained about an app going out of business and discontinuing updates, but I don't have any patience when they take active steps to renege on their promises by adding ads or taking features away - that's just fraud.

I call bullshit on the claims of “promise”.

When you buy a $3 app on iOS this is not a contractual or moral obligation or promise to provide decades of updates for free.

Just because someone says a promise was broken doesn’t make it true.

> When you buy a $3 app on iOS this is not a contractual or moral obligation or promise to provide decades of updates for free.

Who asked for free updates? I repeat:

> I don't think I've ever complained about an app going out of business and discontinuing updates

Rather than the opening paragraph crying about “broken promises” (which weren’t actually ever promised) perhaps the article should complain that Apple won’t let you download old versions of apps you paid for.

Of course Apple forces devs to update their apps every couple of years to support new minimum SDK requirements.

>I know this will get downvotes. But I’m not wrong.

Well, that statement was half wrong.

Rude: yes

Value Added: no

It was rude, and I probably shouldn't have posted it on HN. It was intended to point out something though, and that was to call out the parent post.

In my opinion, at least, stating something and then adding "I am right!" is rude and disrespectful. It's implying that anybody that disagrees with you is not just wrong, but wrong to the degree that you cannot even allow for the possibility that you are mistaken, or that conversation is pointless. That's why I was rude back.

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.

Selling one version is fine if you're clear about that up front. But selling "Pocket Casts" then later selling "Pocket Casts 2" as a separate product is a little bit sneaky if you gave the impression it would include updates. I remember some company that did a similar trick selling licenses with free updates forever. Then one-day they renamed updates to upgrades, which weren't free anymore and pissed off their existing customers.

The App Store does not have any kind of native support for selling app upgrades which leads to all kinds of problems:

* Links on the web to your app die since the links go to the old version, people who see your app recommended click the link and think the app is gone.

* You can't keep supporting users of older versions with simple bug fix releases without leaving the app live on the store, which confuses users into buying the old version of the app.

* You can't sell upgrades at a discount price (which is common in any other software market)

* Just user confusion in general. They go to reinstall the app, search the App Store "didn't I already buy this? I says I haven't!" The App Store also doesn't give developers any access to customer info so you can only guide these users to the right place in the App Store to find the old version and hope they figure it out.

You can make an app no longer available for sale without removing the ability to download it for existing customers. That's all that is really needed. You can also create bundles that discount for new purchasers if they own the old one. I've seen this done by a few people.

It's not something that is well supported, but it's not infeasible.

> Links on the web to your app die since the links go to the old version, people who see your app recommended click the link and think the app is gone.

Links to the store listing page, yes, but also I wouldn't trust those links to work permanently anyway, I'd create a redirect page in my control.

Deep link connections into apps are evaluated at install time, so if a user installs a new version and the site allows this, that should transition correctly.

> You can't keep supporting users of older versions with simple bug fix releases without leaving the app live on the store, which confuses users into buying the old version of the app.

I would suggest stopping updates. If you're disciplined about software releases you can burn down the list of bugs to the point that it's negligible towards the end of the major version, and then close it as no longer updated. Bugs on new OSes are out of scope, a good reason for users to update.

> You can't sell upgrades at a discount price (which is common in any other software market)

I'm pretty sure I've seen this done via an admittedly awkward use of bundles. Alternatively a soft launch to existing users with temporary discount seems very common.

> Just user confusion in general.

This feels solvable, and it's not like the current situation doesn't result in confusion. We have plenty of confusion, so it's just about figuring out the better option. This will vary by userbase.

If they just didn't update it, that would have been fantastic. It's the updates that added ads which are the problem.

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.

I'm a big fan of Marco! We link to Overcast in our web feeds and such.

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