Updated Pocket Casts to the latest beta (7.97-rc-1) and got these stupid fucking banner ads on top

  • dantheclamman@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    Enshittification. I have become certain that any app owned by a for-profit company has to follow this path. There is no way to sustain forever growth without harming the product. I have used Pocket Casts for a decade and have premium. I stick with it because I love the web features and feel fine paying for those but I suspect the deal will keep getting worse all the time, Vader style.

  • misery mansion@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    6 days ago

    Stopped using it years ago when they redesigned it completely. I remember people HATED it, but they really did make it worse.

    I use Podcast Addict instead which isn’t perfect but looks like it has more features that I use than Antenna Pod

    • Perspectivist@feddit.ukEnglish
      4·
      6 days ago

      I don’t even remember what they did when I bailed. Some redesign thing close to a decade ago. I’ve been using Podcast Republic ever since as it resembles what Pocket Cast was like before they screwed it up.

    • Lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      6 days ago

      I paid for Pocket Casts years ago. Then shortly after, they announced it was going to be free. I think I got a refund. Don’t remember.

      I can’t say I’m surprised at this decision to stuff it with ads. Gotta pay for development somehow, and unfortunately they took the easy route, i.e. data collection and ads.

  • florge@feddit.ukEnglish
    7·
    6 days ago

    This day was always going to come, I’ve got them as well. Maybe it’s time to look at something like PinePods, since it was only the cross device syncing keeping me using pocket casts.

  • skoberlink@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    6 days ago

    I would like to switch to another app, preferably FOSS, but I haven’t found another decent one that has the filters feature from PocketCasts. This is the feature that lets you apply a preset filter to the total list of episodes. I use it to auto-build a queue of just certain podcasts, instead of all of my subscriptions.

    Any chance someone has seen that feature elsewhere?

    • baatliwala@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      8·
      6 days ago

      Pocket Casts client is actually open source, server is not AFAIK.

      I am very curious if they are going to implement something like Google Ads in the future because I don’t recall any open source app ever having third party ads. Right now there is only a banner ad to subscribe to Premium but on clicking the X button there is an option to “report ad” so surely they are getting third party ads? I have seen locked down features with premium version having full features, but never ads really. Maybe the MPL license they have chosen is very lenient in that way.

      If someone forks the app and creates a fully FOSS version I will be fine using that.

      • BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.ukEnglish
        2·
        5 days ago

        OMG thank you for that knowledge! I’ve been putting off building a podcast server for years because I couldn’t be arsed learning some front end framework.