{"id":7050795,"date":"2026-08-29T12:27:51","date_gmt":"2026-08-29T12:27:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/apple-2\/michael-tsai-blog-indie-podcast-apps-not-growing\/"},"modified":"2026-08-29T12:27:51","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T12:27:51","slug":"michael-tsai-blog-indie-podcast-apps-not-growing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7050795","title":{"rendered":"Michael Tsai – Blog – Indie Podcast Apps Not Growing"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Dustin Bluck<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Independent podcast apps are not growing as a category. This is not a particular secret, but perhaps you haven\u2019t seen it stated explicitly. It\u2019s the sort of thing that has to be inferred, but there\u2019s plenty of available data if you look for it. While the podcasting sector has seen growth, this has occurred almost entirely on platforms like YouTube, and the independent podcast app userbase has mostly just stood still. <\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure somewhere out there a 21-year-old just downloaded Castro or Pocket Casts for the first time and thinks RSS feeds are awesome (if you are this person, please email me). But every number I can see indicates the userbase is both static and aging. Every new customer I talk to has used some combination of Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or Castro for at least the last 5 years if not the last 10.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Perhaps there are healthy businesses that get very few new users but instead gracefully age with the ones they have. Ferrari maybe? Buddy, smartphone apps are not one of those businesses.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

I would rather work on flashy features to capture new users, but, reality being what it is, I have to think about things in terms of both the health of the ecosystem and what will actually help retain existing podcast app users.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Nick Heer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Anil Dash<\/a> wrote, in 2014, that the simple phrase wherever you get your podcasts<\/em> is a \u201cradical statement\u201d:<\/p>\n

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[\u2026] Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that\u2019s supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that\u2019s not owned by any one company, that can\u2019t be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Video podcasting changes that. In its simplest form, it is just a YouTube channel, which means it is siloed and controlled by Google. Spotify also supports video but only in its app<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Ilya Birman<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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So Marco described a problem. What if someone manually asks to download an episode when they already have three downloaded? You can\u2019t just immediately delete it to keep things tidy. So what do you do? Marco added a special hidden \u201cepisode downloaded manually\u201d flag to the database, so those episodes would not count towards the limit.<\/p>\n

This is one more example of how even the most seemingly trivial features require thinking through and accounting for different cases that may not be obvious at first glance. Every user interface designer and product designer should collect and absorb examples like this.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Finally, Marco\u2019s wife Tiff suggests a solution to all the problems: just don\u2019t let users download more episodes, she said, and show them a message, roughly: \u201cYour episode limit is three, but this would be the fourth, denied\u201d.<\/p>\n

Marco liked the solution. I didn\u2019t. Sure, it solves Marco\u2019s problems, but not the user\u2019s. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Marcin Wichary<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Birman presents this as \u201cLet me click,\u201d but I wanted to offer two alternative\/\u200bcomplementary principles that helped me before:<\/p>\n