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Comment by ruytlm | Hacker News Reader

This is all well and good, but why does everyone need to have their own damn app?

This is the biggest problem with audio apps these days - you get everyone trying to make a similar thing, and because they're all competing they all try and lock each other out of their own products.

What would be so much better is a content-agnostic platform, that'll let you play whatever the hell you want - whether it's music, talk radio, podcasts, whatever.

Seriously - why does everyone assume that if I want to listen to e.g. NPR, I only want to listen to NPR?

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I'm not sure I understand your critique. It appears NPR has come up with an interesting approach to allowing discovery of content it has access to in the form of this app, but they understandably aren't planning to get into the business of providing access to all audio content in the world via their app. But you are not restricted to using the NPR app to listen to NPR. Their content is also available in numerous other ways, including podcasts and streaming radio, as well as traditional local radio affiliates. So what exactly is your complaint?

but they understandably aren't planning to get into the business of providing access to all audio content in the world via their app

Yeah, they aren't iheartradio or anything.

Podcasts exist and NPR uses that format liberally. You can pick from several excellent podcast apps and access a lot of NPR’s content that way.

NPR also has an excellent website where you can listen to their content on mobile devices.

This app is a third way to access their content. It doesn’t make sense for everyone (if someone only listens to one NPR show – for example Planet Money – and also a lot of other, similar audio content from other sources I would recommend getting a podcast app they like; if someone only occasionally listens to NPR – for example when someone recommends them something specific – I would recommend just visiting the website), but it can make sense for certain people.

So no, NPR very much does not assume that you only want to listen to NPR. That’s a completely incorrect assumption on your part.

If you want everything get a podcast app. NPR has nothing against podcasts and you can get the right feeds from them. If NPR would want to discontinue offering podcast feeds you would have a point … but as it stands right now you just sound incoherent and uninformed.

Edit: Ok, there are several excellent podcast apps on iOS. No idea about Android, could be royally broken there, but I don’t really care. That platform is broken, anyway. More broken than iOS at least. Podcast apps on iOS are a healthy category with lots of competition and radically different approaches – so there should be an at least acceptable app for everyone.

> This is all well and good, but why does everyone need to have their own damn app?

I can't comment on this new app yet but I'm a near daily user of the regular NPR app (which I think is officially called "NPR news"). It's way better than any generic radio app I've tried.

Besides listening to the individual local stations, you can also get the latest news (the ~4-minute hourly blurb), can create playlists of entire shows (without the interludes, i.e. just the content), and built-in news articles (for reading, not listening). I've even used the local NPR station finder to help me tune an analog radio when in a new city where I'm not familiar with the local stations.

It'd take quite a bit of agreement on content licensing and data formats to have anything like that be as usable as the NPR app across multiple content providers.

> Seriously - why does everyone assume that if I want to listen to e.g. NPR, I only want to listen to NPR?

Well some of us do :D

I agree with your sentiment when it comes to e-commerce and print publishing, but for radio, I'm already a big app-consumer.

Why? So I can escape the soul-crushing drudgery of Car Talk and Prairie Home Companion. They're good shows, but they're essentially the same show, repeated thousands of times. And no matter where I am, they seem to be what's on the local NPR station.

So I already have apps (or streams in the Radium app) for the CBC, BBC, Deutsche Welle, etc. If this new NPR app lets me listen without needing to constantly fiddle with my phone and select stories, I'll use it a lot.

Podcasts are a content-agnostic platform. They've been around for a while, the software is easy to use, they're easy to find. NPR, NYT, ESPN and many others have all had podcasts for quite a while.

If you want live radio, you can stream from mobile Safari. I'm not sure about others. Music, of course, has always been available. Since before smart phones, even.

In short, you don't need these apps any more than most other apps.

"This is all well and good, but why does everyone need to have their own damn app?"

Also, why do all these damned apps have ridiculous access requirements ? In recent weeks I have been dismayed to find that HBO Go and Sonos apps both require access to all of my media files (android app) in order to be installed.

I'll bet that's not uncommon. Presumably it's just lazy development by people that don't know the finer points of the SDKs, etc., but it's pretty ridiculous what a lot of these apps (that, as the parent points out, aren't really necessary anyway[1]) require.

[1] HBO Go does not need to be an app, as demonstrated by the fact that I use it in my browser (OSX) every day.

I mean, given Sonos streams your media, that one should probably be pretty obvious why it wants to access your media...

This seems to be due to Google's new grouping of permissions for Android apps. The permission group you're referring to is described as "Uses one or more of: files on the device such as images, videos, or audio, the device's external storage". That means that if the app wants to use some of its own data which is located on external storage (which is pretty common), you're also giving it permission to access your media files on the device, because Google thinks (for some incomprehensible reason) that these are similar permissions and grouping them makes it easier for users to understand what's going on.

>Google thinks (for some incomprehensible reason) that these are similar permissions and grouping them makes it easier for users to understand

Yeah, I suppose they don't want to be too granular and overwhelm users with a ton of permissions but, to your point, it actually makes things worse. Overly broad categories lead to suspicion.

It's funny though, because for years, we all downloaded/installed desktop apps which had free reign on our machines. I suppose the facts that apps can come from untrusted sources, are thought to have more specific functions, are installed on very personal devices, and were born in an age where privacy concerns/fraud/malware/connectedness were common, all have something to do with it.

I wonder, though, if our concern is mostly stimulated by the fact that we're now being presented with permission choices in the first place. As, now, even "trusted" brands like HBO can earn our suspicion if we think their apps are being greedy with permission requests.

Sometimes it's helpful. For example, I do listen to a bunch of podcasts and I follow some DJs on Soundcloud. But every once in a while, there's just NOTHING good being posted. So it's good to have a fallback to a radio station of some kind, one that I can just open the app, hit the "big triangle", and just get music immediately. That instant gratification is the real value of the app. I have Rinse.FM's app for this purpose.

Incidentally, I feel like as smartphones become more ubiquitous and embedded into the rest of our lives, we'll start to see apps that have a much more simple purpose. After all, since Siri isn't programmable by app developers, the fastest way to listen to NPR is now downloading the app, holding your home button, and saying "Open NPR One". Perhaps the app could be designed so that it immediately begins streaming when you open it, that way you can just tell your phone something and suddenly you're listening to the radio.

All of this audio streaming is on a consistent platform, it's mostly Icecast or SHOUTcast servers doing the actual streaming. Theoretically, one could build a directory of radio stations like Nullsoft did with SHOUTcast, but the main issue is the platform has never been created by a company whose SOLE PURPOSE is to index and catalog current radio stations. Until we get that, I don't think you're gonna see a platform improvement any time soon.

I think what ruytlm meant was why is NPR One not delivered as just an internet radio stream that any Shoutcast client can connect to. There's a good reason of course: Shoutcast's protocol doesn't allow for an kind of user input, which prevents NPR One from implementing any kind of voting system so that it can curate its selection. Such functionality would be useful for traditional internet radio stations. Many stations take feedback about the current song on their main site, take requests, etc. and it would be great if the Shoutcast protocol allowed stations to display some kind of form to provide interactivity.

Not only that, NPR's shows are available in other ways on standard protocols. I listen to a couple of shows regularly through my phone's built in podcast client.

They're adding a new way to access their media because it does things that the generic clients can't. That doesn't mean the other distribution channels are going away.

I worked on this at NPR back it when it was called the Infinite Player. We'd envisioned NPR branded apps as well as integrations into other platforms (mobile, connected cars) and potentially other apps. We architected the underlying APIs with this in mind, so what you seek will probably happen at some point. At launch though, NPR wanted the pop of a branded offering, and I think they've got it.

I agree totally. The problem is, I haven't been able to find one single content-agnostic app that does any of this very well. Either it's iPhone only. Or Android only. Or iPhone and Android but no web app. Or it doesn't sync my last listening position, or sometimes even what I've listened to at all. Or any other number of very basic things I'd expect an app like this to have.

> Or iPhone and Android but no web app

Pocket Casts is awesome but there have been times when I really wanted a web version. Lately though I use Chromecast from the app when I'd normally want the PC to play the track.

I agree with the annoyance of everyone and their mother wanting their own app, but NPR seems like a big enough piece of a lot of folks entertainment/news lives that it makes sense. (I say this as someone who never listens to NPR.)

The question is whether the product is used frequently enough and can actually make use of a custom interface, compared to whether a more generic app would actually provide value. If I would use the generic app to listen to NPR 95% of the time, then it probably makes more sense to dedicate the app to NPR and just use a web browser for the other 5%.

Reversing XKCD, it's probably better to think of apps as slightly heavy and custom websites. There's really not much loss in having lots more apps so long as they're lighweight. Throw them all into a folder on your homescreen.

http://xkcd.com/1367/

They have to play all sides. Replacing FM listening is like replacing oil: there's no one platform that big. Half of listening occurs in cars, and as the fleet turns over to TCP/IP listening over the next decade, NPR has to be there wherever. There will be branded apps, they will serve third-party apps and car specific apps, etc. Another audio provider (i.e. Pandora) could license NPR content and have access to the same APIs. I am not suggesting this is in the works, just a pure hypothetical argument. I haven't worked there since February but I did work on APIs and worked on this listening app a few years ago.

Everyone needs to have an app because if you don't have an app today you are not a digital brand. I'm a web developer so I'd love for responsive design to be enough, but frankly it's not. Users demand apps, and the most passionate NPR fans will eat this thing up (it's actually looks like an interesting app that brings more to the table than 99% of apps so good on them).

Is this stopping you from getting NPR content in a regular podcatcher? Do they have an annoying "app-wall" forcing you to install the app when you visit npr.org on a mobile device? No? Then I don't see what the problem is.

Because content creators are trying to maximize the revenue generated from that content.

We can't fault a company (or non-profit organization for that matter) for following their optimal strategy, can we? Sure it's an annoyance to the end-user because it fragments the market, but that's where there's an opportunity for a disruption!

If everything were on iTunes, would that make you happy? It's clear to me that the cut that Apple is taking (for the benefit of inclusion on their "content-agnostic platform") is something that is untenable for NPR and many other similar content producers out there.

Because almost anyone who eventually "owns the platform", eventually squeezes the content producers out of all the profit.

Why would I cooperate with a central platform, when once its achieves market dominance, it uses that position to dictate my profit margins?

If it's a standard nobody "owns" the plaform.

Nobody "owns" RSS for example.

Agreed. Swell (apparently to be acquired by Apple) and Antenna Radio are delivering a similar experience but without the NPR limitation.

Because there's only so many icons on your home screen and everyone wants as many of those as they can get.

The issue is letting your brand be accessible on some third party's (often) sub par app/platform, where you don't get access to data (often) and have little to no control on the UX. The tradeoff is app fatigue and a cluttered app store. It's hard to remember what app does what and many sit on your device rarely used since they become forgotten.

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