Pocket Casts mobile apps for Android and iOS are now open source
Pocket Casts has announced that its apps for Android and iOS are now open source. The podcast player app debuted in 2010, it was available as a premium offering with a $3.99 price tag.
NPR acquired the rights for Pocket Casts in 2018, and a year later, the podcast apps were made free when the company introduced a premium monthly subscription called, Pocket Casts Plus.
Pocket Casts mobile apps are now open source
The journey didn't end there, Automattic acquired Pocket Casts in 2021. It is not surprising considering that the mobile apps have been open sourced now, because the company's other products, Simple Note and WordPress are also open source.
A blog post that announced the news on Automattic's website says that the company does not want podcasting to be controlled by Apple and Spotify. It explained that it wants to support a diverse ecosystem of third-party clients, as the reason for making the apps open source. It's good to see someone go head on to compete with the bigwigs.
Automattic says that it will continue supporting its premium subscription, Pocket Casts Plus. It offers extra features such as 10GB of cloud storage, themes, folders for organizing your podcasts, desktop apps for Windows and Mac, and Apple Watch playback. The premium plans start at a price of $0.99 a month, and costs $9.99 for a yearly subscription (before taxes). Since this is a completely optional add-on, you can just ignore it and use the mobile versions for free.
The source code for the Pocket Casts mobile apps for iOS and Android have been released on GitHub, each version has its own repository. The company has opted to open source the apps under the Mozilla Public License (MPL 2.0). Plenty of issues and pull requests have been filed over the past few months in preparation for the announcement, and now users and developers can contribute to the projects to suggest new features, and bug fixes to make the app better.
Note: Pocket Casts desktop apps are not open source, since they are exclusive to the premium subscription.
If you don't have the app on your phone, you can download Pocket Casts from the Google Play Store or the iOS App Store. The Android app's repo has an APK available for download, so the app could make its way to F-droid too. Since the source code has been released, it is very likely that we could see other developers forking Pocket Casts to create their own version of the app, and improve upon its design and features.
The apps don't have ads, and allow you to download episodes for offline listening, the interface is clean. There is no reason not to try it. You don't need to create an account with Pocket Casts to subscribe, listen to, or download podcast episodes. Signing up for an account does have its advantages, it ensures that you don't lose your data, e.g, subscriptions, played episodes, etc. It also syncs the content between devices, so you can pick up where you left off quite easily. If you use RSS feeds to subscribe to podcasts, you need to submit the feed's URL here, and set it to public/private, to add it to your list.
Pocket Casts is already very popular, but now that it has gone open source, I think it might attract even more users. AntennaPod, which is also an open source app for Android, is also a very good player.
What is your favorite podcast player?
Uhh, this has already been possible – I am not sure how but remember my brother telling me about it. I’m not a whatsapp user so not sure of the specifics, but something about sending the image as a file and somehow bypassing the default compression settings that are applied to inbound photos.
He has also used this to share movies to whatsapp groups, and files 1Gb+.
Like I said, I never used whatsapp, but I know 100% this isn’t a “brand new feature”, my brother literally showed me him doing it, like… 5 months ago?
Martin, what happened to those: 12 Comments (https://www.ghacks.net/chatgpt-gets-schooled-by-princeton-university/#comments). Is there a specific justifiable reason why they were deleted?
Hmm, it looks like the gHacks website database is faulty, and not populating threads with their relevant cosponsoring posts.
The page on ghacks this is on represents the best of why it has become so worthless, fill of click-bait junk that it’s about to be deleted from my ‘daily reads’.
It’s really like “Press Release as re-written by some d*ck for clicks…poorly.” And the subjects are laughable. Can’t wait for “How to search for files on Windows”.
> The page on ghacks this is on represents the best of why it has become so worthless, fill of click-bait junk…
Sadly, I have to agree.
Only Martin and Ashwin are worth subscribing to.
Especially Emre Çitak and Shaun are the worst ones.
If ghacks.net intended “Clickbait”, it would mark the end of Ghacks Technology News.
Ghacks doesn’t need crappy clickbaits. Clearly separate articles from newer authors (perhaps AIs and external sales person or external advertising man) as just “Advertisements”!
We, the subscribers of Ghacks, urge Martin to make a decision.
because nevermore wants to “monetize” on every aspect of human life…
“Threads” is like the Walmart of Social Media.
How hard can it be to clone a twitter version of that as well? They’re slow.
Yes, why not mention how large the HD files can be?
Why, not mention what version of WhatsApp is needed?
These omissions make the article feel so bare. If not complete.
Sorry posted on the wrong page.
such a long article for such a simple matter. Worthless article ! waste of time
I already do this by attaching them via the ‘Document’ option.
I don’t know what’s going on here at Ghacks but it’s obvious that something is broken, comments are being mixed whatever the article, I am unable to find some of my later posts neither. :S
Quoting the article,
“As users gain popularity, the value of their tokens may increase, allowing investors to reap rewards.”
Besides, beyond the thrill and privacy risks or not, the point is to know how you gain popularity, be it on social sites as everywhere in life. Is it by being authentic, by remaining faithful to ourselves or is it to have this particular skill which is to understand what a majority likes, just like politicians, those who’d deny to the maximum extent compatible with their ideological partnership, in order to grab as many of the voters they can?
I see the very concept of this Friend.tech as unhealthy, propagating what is already an increasing flaw : the quest for fame. I won’t be the only one to count himself out, definitely.
@John G. is right : my comment was posted on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/23/what-is-friend-tech/] and it appears there but as well here at [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/07/08/how-to-follow-everyone-on-threads/]
This has been lasting for several days. Fix it or at least provide some explanations if you don’t mind.
> Google Chrome is following in Safari’s footsteps by introducing a new feature that allows users to move the Chrome address bar to the bottom of the screen, enhancing user accessibility and interaction.
Firefox did this long before Safari.
Basically they’ll do anything except fair royalties.