As podcasts continue to soar in popularity, Apple’s been focusing a lot harder on its podcast app, creatively named ‘Apple Podcasts’. Along with a slew of updates, the company announced the arrival of a subscription service back in April, which would allow content creators to support themselves through their listeners rather than by solely relying on ad revenue.
Unfortunately, since then, content creators feel let down by Apple Podcasts, putting up with rampant bugs and having to jump through too many hoops to reap the benefits of Apple’s subscription model.
Apple users’ podcast blues
The big issue creators are having with the subscription model is, in essence, using it. Creators want to reach as many ears as possible, so they like to spread their content far and wide. For this reason, many creators use RSS to publish their work. RSS posts new episodes to a range of podcasting platforms, meaning users only have to put their work in one place and navigate one UI to get their shows on all their platforms, like Spotify, Apple, and Google.
However, if users want to upload subscriber/paid content to Apple Podcasts, they have to do it manually through Apple’s own backend, and a lot of them have struggled with it.
One podcast manager told The Verge that they once waited an entire night for an episode of their show to upload through Podcasts’ backend. In contrast, they can upload their content to Patreon in a few minutes. Other content creators have had similar experiences, with some experiencing episode upload delays of several days.
Additionally, creators find the subscription model as a whole clunky and hard to use. For example, rather than hosting subscription analytics online as it does with regular podcast data, Apple delivers this data to creators in the form of a txt.gz file or a spreadsheet. While that’s not as bad as not making the data available at all, it seems a little out of character for Apple, often touting its own focus on clean design and ease of use. What’s more, is that some creators report not being able to even open these files.
Listeners have been affected by technical bugs too, including issues syncing their accounts across devices, having their libraries filled with podcast episodes they’d already listened to, and an issue where the auto-download feature just stopped working for some.
While you could maybe chalk up a lot of creators’ issues with the new backend to user error or to its relative infancy, when it could potentially harm their livelihoods it’s not a great excuse. Podcast audiences are a fickle bunch, and when episodes of shows are being delayed by days at a time they’re quick to move on to something new. For listeners, all it means is finding a new show. For creators, late episodes could mean not being able to make rent. It’s a bad look for Apple on the whole, particularly when you compare it to some of its competitors.
Source: The Verge
