Kinda sped read the article so apologies if I missed it, but why does the author here feel so entitled to something that clearly the company feels unreasonable to continuously maintain? They're clearly a struggling business, it feels like this author has a personal vendetta against the company and would rather they go out of business than break a 14 year old promise made from an entirely different internet economy era.
If the bank refused to return the money I loaned them, I would rightfully be very upset. I think it's similarly fair to be upset about a company revoking lifetime memberships.
This particular situation is more of a grey area, but I don't think maintenance and operating costs are a sufficient excuse.
We may need a law that regulates "lifetime" purchases. One part is standardised disclosure. The other is putting fees into a trust.
> If the bank refused to return the money I loaned them, I would rightfully be very upset.
Everyone who bought the app STILL have access to the app. All features they paid for are still available (except if you consider no ad a feature).
The "correct" way to do it is change current app to classic and release a new app but that's quite cumbersome. I would like Apple or Google to offer an option to provide paid upgrade options.
People were promised they just needed to pay one fee to get the app.
Then, they went to a subscription fee, but grandfathered in previous purchasers.
Now, they've introduced ads.
Their overhead is their problem, they sold me something and now they are renegging. It's like the first thing in the article, not exactly burried.
If you bought the app only you weren't grandfathered into anything. You needed to have also bought the web player.
You're demanding more than a decade of free app updates for a small sum you paid ages ago. Why can't you instead be happy with all the value you got from the app? We aren't born to be small minded and stingy, look up to greater goals and a greater attitude in life. We only have so many years before it is cut from us.
we have come to a place where corporations are calling limited “unlimited” and outright just lying to people.
i have seen people unironically defend this as “well if they don’t lie, then how do you expect them to sell their product?” again, people have said this entirely unironically.
i think it’s far more reasonable to expect a company to be held to their contracts and agreements. normal people certainly are.
i’ll never understand how we got to a place where so many corporations can say with a straight face “we deserve to make money in any way possible and it’s unfair for you to hold us to any kind of responsibility for our own actions”
So, "a place where a business is held to their word" has never been existed.
1. A few kb of playlists and accounts 2. Probably a search service 3. Likely artwork caching
It's not free to run this.. but it's not exactly expensive either.
Many users pay and don't use the app very much. I am sure there are some super users who use a lot.
And most apps continue to sell, make enough income to fund a few devs and keep the services on. Even with a one time payment.
It's not like pocketcasts is paying the podcasters or producing content.
The problem is seeing every single dumb thing as some kind of mega-growth M&A deal when it's not. No, your podcast app won't make you hundreds of millions, sorry.
I mean, everytime I see someone talking about them on Twitter, they are clearly struggling with _something_.
They promised a thing they could not deliver on and that was sufficient to get enough users that they could then sell the app onwards to a bunch of suckers. This is a classic play in the "sell dollars for pennies and then sell the dollars-for-pennies app to a guy with a lot of dollars who eventually gets sick of buying pennies with dollars" genre.
Lifetime licenses only work in the beginning when you have people buying them at regular intervals, at some point the market is saturated and you need to have a subscription model.
Case in point: Unraid. I have two grandfathered "forever" licenses and I'll never need a third.
They added a new/better interface you have to pay money to unlock. When they add new features/services you now have to pay to unlock. What you paid for originally, still yours. Want to get access to the new stuff? You can either pay a subscription for "everything" or pay one-time-unlocks for features.
Then I look at serviecs like lichess where they just operate 100% on donations and users helping by adding their devices into the pool of compute for analysis.
"Shove ads in" is the low, easiest, tackiest way to "annoy" your users into paying. Those that already paid once are annoyed the goalposts have changed. Make the app worth paying an upgrade for, don't just go "well it's still shit but now there's ads unless you pay!"
Because they paid for it.
If you make a contract that involves you receiving a one-time fee for something that will cost you far more than that fee, then you will eventually go out of business for being stupid.
Yes, there are hosting costs and maintenance costs. So the original deal (pay once for something that costs us ongoing money) was a stupid business decision. Doesn't change the fact that they undertook to make that contract. So now they should be held to it.
And the fact that someone else bought them does not invalidate the contract. When you acquire a business, you acquire their contractual obligations. As it should be, otherwise contracts cannot be trusted in the long run.
Example: I recently wrote the T&S for my Finnish dictionary app (still working on it), and I make it clear in advance that the license was a one time fee for perpetual use for that major version. [1]
I can do this because the app is almost entirely offline, and because for the parts that are, smart cloud infra decisions means my recurring infra costs are low. If I add in features which imply a bespoke server down the line, of course that would probably be a major version upgrade - and a change in the pricing model to boot. But I'd still keep the old v1 stuff up for the lifers.
[1]: https://taskusanakirja.com/terms-of-service/#91-pricing-and-...
For the concerns of contracts, you are not alone on the suffering side. Alltogether humanity elevated tolerance to this level, this is not a surprise.
We're talking about Automattic. It's virtually their business model.
Longer context: At Automattic, we take very seriously the sustainability of the promises we make to users of our products, including serving trillions of free requests to WP.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and many other services over the years.
We want every product to be self-sustaining, so it doesn't rely on my benevolence, but instead has an engine of value creation and capture that can be something we continue to maintain and support for decades to come. We really do think long-term, as evidenced by our 100-year plan on WP.com.
The Pocket Casts business model is similar to that of many other products, featuring a free version with ads and a paid upgrade with additional features and no ads, much like Spotify, YouTube, and others.
As a matter of engineering ethics, I don't believe in "lifetime" purchases, and we don't create new ones at Automattic, but we have honored the legacy people who paid a one-time fee to Pocket Casts when they were a startup with basically what we call a "Champions" account, which is a lifetime you-get-the-best-of-whatever-we-sell deal. There are only a few thousand of these folks, so it seemed better to try and make it more of a gift than attempt to migrate people to what is actually a sustainable business model, which is a recurring subscription.
We open-sourced Pocket Casts after acquiring it because I believe that in the podcasting world, it's vital to have an open-source alternative to proprietary distribution networks.
I appreciate that. I hope you do. But I do not for one second believe the truth of it. If it were true, you wouldn't have been having customer service respond to people complaining about this by trying to hock a paid subscription. In both emails and in your forums.
This is not a bug in the technical sense. At best, it is choosing to walk back a policy after pushback.
> we have honored the legacy people who paid a one-time fee to Pocket Casts when they were a startup with basically what we call a "Champions" account
This is, as of now, factually untrue. Only those who paid for the web version get that. It should have been for everyone, and hopefully now you will apply it to everyone. But when you first announced paid subscriptions you were very clear: those who paid for the web version get premium for free. And even that was only done because the web version was being locked behind premium, and only after pushback for your first plan of giving them one year free.
For those of us who bought the app on iOS and Android, the promise of "pay once, use forever" was broken a long time ago. It is only because the features being granted by that paid version were not actually very appealing that it didn't become much of an issue before now.
By adding ads into a product people paid for (your customer service representatives are lying in your forums by saying it's a "free product"), you've crossed a line. The answer now is to make sure those of us who paid for your app (not once, but twice) get the full version of it, just like the advertising promised us when we bought it.
Nor do I when I read passive-aggressive replies from Automattic on the Google Play store: "Hi Matthew! If you believe that your one-time payment entitles you to Plus access, which removes the ads, please reach out to us: [URL]. The banner ads help us sustain the app so we can continue making it available for free."
Appreciate you being public in places like this. I sent a similar message to Pocketcasts support but received an AI that seems to disagree with your comment here.
This is not true for people, like me, who only bought the Android version. We were not tagged with "Champion", but this was stated: "you’ll still have access to the mobile app features you paid for".
This was in the description of the app at the time:
"There are many more powerful, straight forward features help you make Pocket Casts yours and in case you were wondering, here’s what Pocket Casts DOESN’T have: ads, episode limits, pushy trials, feature bloat or plugins.
It. Just. Works."
Now I have ads, and when I try to dismiss them I am greeted with a pushy sales pitch for a subscription.
Life is too short for this, and I've moved on to another app. But perhaps this is insightful as to why some users are frustrated and upset.
A thread was also pointing out in the google support forums for another app that did the same thing, ignoring a no-ads purchase and forcing a new subscription, and google asked to report the app from the store as this violates their terms of service
I used to subscribe to PocketCasts Plus, but I stopped when they raised the price. It's so expensive.
They do not host any media -- The volume of post searching fulltext is so small single PSQL instance can take over -- your listening progress is a single integer ...
I use it every day. It's smooth, seamless, and FOSS.
Note that I am just a user, and not otherwise linked with them.
Caveat: I *only* listen to Podcasts on my phone so I don't have to think about syncing library/status between devices.
To be fair, in Star Trek you will see them carrying around like 3-4 data tablets, so even our broken enshittified tech works in a way Star Trek future predictors thought would be high tech.
They should be forced to publish a new APK with a different name to change monetization strategies or honor what people paid for. This is fraud and theft.
The argument on a "lifetime subscription" also does not really apply here. The app was a one-time purchase and then made free somewhere in 2019. Their logic was that early app purchasers would still receive the same set of features when the app was made free and a subscription was introduced. Source https://support.pocketcasts.com/knowledge-base/lifetime-acce...
Basically, purchasers didn't lose any features in 2019 onwards. The purchase was also for the entire app, not just an ad-free version, as there were no ads to begin with.
Most beneficial for me is its customizations that can be applied to all shows or configured for individual shows. For example, all episodes for all shows can be set to play at 1¼x speed, but one show could be set to play at 1x speed. For me, the interview format can be at the faster speed, but the music podcast is better at regular speed. Similarly, users could set all shows' episodes to start at the 30-second mark because of, say, opening ads, but a specific show could be set to start at a different time because its opening is unlike the others.
I listen to enough shows that these configuration options make the app great for me. It's been a long time since I tried alternatives, but none of them ever stuck for more than (at most) a few days because the presentation or lack of customizations were less satisfying or convenient.
Truthfully, just writing this has compelled me to give the developer another in-app tip. It's been years since I did that and I must average at least 20 hours of use a week.
I switched over to Spotify. The only gripe I have with Spotify is when my phone encounters a dead spot, Spotify puts up a modal "You're offline" and loses my place in the podcast.
To be clear, it's not just that they added ads, but they are obnoxiously in the main active screen while things are playing. Made me also disrespect Automattic as well as this seems very poor behaviour on their part.
Did I expect free updates and features forever. No, Only the bare minimum to keep it running.
Hell, if it was owned by a small company or an individual I wouldn’t mind donating to keep it maintained once in a while. I don’t feel the need for a subscription for a podcast app. The fanciest feature I’ve used in the past 10 years is the sleep after 15 min options.
Saddest is that they are advertising their own apps. Good to know which one to avoid.
Are they rehosting all the audio and that's bandwidth costs? Even then it seemed high.
I am sympathetic with author, but unfortunately it is also one, if not the best podcast app technically. It has this 0-bullshit UI which does what you expect without enforcing some maddening organization patterns (Castro) of fancy UI with hilarious amount of bugs (looking at you, Overcast).
It has the "mark as played" button, also in car play.
It is the only one I've found capable to pull the episode on Apple Watch over network, instead of relying on pre-caching from phone app.
I would be very sad if PocketCasts goes out of business.
P.S.: I checked and it seems that Overcast also has cellular streaming on AW - I need to test it again.
They do have a few online features they run, like syncing your subscribed podcasts and listening progress and whatnot, and I think they have their own index of RSS links for searching, but nothing compared to streaming audio.
Anyway, as of today they backtracked on showing ads to people who purchased the app before it went free. I guess they're claiming it was a bug, which I don't really believe but I don't care as long as they undid making the app ugly.
Give me a good 3y or 5y deal, then we're friends.
Any Suggestions for iPhone that I can easily move to from pocketcast?
I'm also not a huge fan of the way hovering over the link turns it into a highlight on the word, but that's not a huge readability issue because the highlight covers the entire character. But having the non-hovered link underline be fat, so that it partially overlaps the baseline of the characters, means that those characters are superimposed on two different backgrounds, pale blue and pale red, and that harms readability.
This site isn't the only one that does this, or I might not be complaining. It's a style that seems to be popular, and I really don't know why. It's a bad idea and people should stop doing it.
You know. I approve the pushback on enshitification. But there’s something weird about righteous fury over an app which literally costs money to run didn’t provide free updates for literally decades on what probably cost like $5.
I dunno. It just kinda rubs me the wrong way.
The company is stuck in a bad place where the most loyal users, probably those getting the most value out of it in the long run, aren't paying for it. Subscriptions for newer users are one way, or trying to upsell existing users, but this subscription is exceptionally expensive for what it is, and they can only monetise the non-standard feature set.
I'd like to see a return to versioned software. Call Pocket Casts done, fork it, release Pocket Casts 2 for $20 with all these features. Next year release Pocket Casts 3 for another $20. People can update or not, up to them.
* Links on the web to your app die since the links go to the old version, people who see your app recommended click the link and think the app is gone.
* You can't keep supporting users of older versions with simple bug fix releases without leaving the app live on the store, which confuses users into buying the old version of the app.
* You can't sell upgrades at a discount price (which is common in any other software market)
* Just user confusion in general. They go to reinstall the app, search the App Store "didn't I already buy this? I says I haven't!" The App Store also doesn't give developers any access to customer info so you can only guide these users to the right place in the App Store to find the old version and hope they figure it out.
I don't personally have the "righteous fury" of the article's author (I'm more just annoyed and disappointed that a nice thing I liked is now noticeably less nice, for complex social and economic reasons outside any one person's control), but I can certainly understand why a person would be mad enough to fork a repo and write a couple hundred words in a blog post.
Release Pocket Caste 2 and they’ll complain. Sub and they’ll complain. Don’t update and they’ll complain.
HN is highly sympathetic to the plight of the open source dev who rage quits because people demand too much for free. This is basically the same thing.
I know this will get downvotes. But I’m not wrong.
However instead they took the existing app and vandalised it, abusing the user's privacy and invading their eyeballs.
You get very little extra for the $15/year subscription fee. That’s not a complaint. You get all of the features that most people care about in the Fred version.
It’s available for the iPhones, iPads and the web with full CarPlay support and it syncs podcasts to the Apple Watch.
He did learn from his mistake of making Instapaper a one time payment and sold it.
For those who don’t know, he was the cofounder of Tumblr.
