In the “Spring Loaded” event earlier this week, Apple dedicated a whopping 75 seconds (out of 3600 seconds) to introduce significant changes to Apple Podcasts. The announcement caused ripples across the entire podcasting ecosystem and for the past few days people have been trying to understand what’s going on and what happens next.
The two main pieces of news are 1) changes to the Apple Podcasts app itself and 2) new tools for podcast creators, such as the the ability to organize shows into channels and build premium subscriptions on Apple Podcasts.
I’ll take a deeper look at the creator tools and subscription features in a separate article. Here, I’ll only touch upon changes introduced to the Podcasts app and to podcast discovery in general.
Apple’s Podcasts app has been around as a separate app since iOS 6, which was released in 2012. Before that, podcasts were available as a section of the iTunes app. Here’s how Apple describes the updates that will be available with iOS 14.5:
New Channels, which are groups of shows curated by creators with unique titles, descriptions, and artwork.
Listeners will be able to browse free channels, making it easy to find more shows from their favorite creators, as well as paid channels and channels that provide additional benefits for subscribers.
An enhanced Search tab that provides quick access to Top Charts and categories.
New customizable pages for every show and episode to make it easier to follow, listen, and share.
A new Smart Play button that helps listeners automatically start episodic shows from the latest episode and serialized shows from the beginning of each series.
Possibility to save individual episodes, which are downloaded for offline playback, making it easy to bookmark podcasts to listen to later from Library.
Interestingly, a key change Apple hasn’t talked about anywhere has got to do with podcast visibility and discovery.
For the past 16 years the iTunes/Apple podcast directory – which has been accessible via an API to third party apps, such as independent podcast players – has been the de facto universal directory of podcasts. The “white pages” of podcasts, so to say.
Now, Apple introduced a new switch for podcast creators, which defines whether or not a podcast registered in the Apple directory (new or old) should be visible to third parties through the query API. By default the switch is off.
What creator of a free podcast would desire to limit the podcast’s visibility on the internet? The answer is: no-one.
Furthermore, this change will essentially close down the universal podcast directory we’ve come to rely on for over a decade. That in turn would have significant ramifications for the RSS-based open nature of the podcasting ecosystem. It would make it very difficult for independent podcast players like Overcast, or any other third-party application dependent on Apple’s podcast directory for that matter, to survive in the long-term.
Marco Arment, the creator or Overcast, commented on Accidental Tech Podcast #427 as follows:
I can not think of a good reason for this check box to exist. I hope Apple not only fixes the bug, if it’s indeed a bug, as it seems almost all podcasts were opted out, which is disastrous. […] I really hope that Apple sees that this is causing significant harm and removes the ability for the opt-out for public RSS feeds, for free public shows.
John Gruber had the following to say on Dithering on April 23rd, 2021:
I’m willing to assume that it’s just a bug or something they didn’t think of. […] Because I just can’t see how that would benefit [Apple]. What would they get from this change? Something else will have to rise as the universal podcast directory and why would Apple want someone else to have that?
I too sincerely hope that Apple never intended to close their podcast directory from third parties and what we’re seeing now is simply a misunderstanding or a bug that will be fixed quickly.
I agree with Gruber that this change is not in Apple’s interests, because someone else (e.g. Google or Spotify) would step up and claim ownership of the universal podcast directory. That would clearly not be good for Apple, because being in control of such a directory has inherently a lot of value.