You most likely just don’t realize that your podcast app of choice actually gets its list of podcasts from Apple. That’s the authors point of Apple hosting it for free for everyone.

my feeds seem to all be: `<title>.libsyn.com/...`, `anchor.fm/.../rss`, `feeds.feedburner.com/<title>`, `feeds.megaphone.fm/<title>`, `feeds.simplecast.com/<title>`, `omny.fm/show/<title>`, `rss.acast.com/<title>`, `rss.art19.com/<title>`, and then a bunch of `<showname>.com/rss` for shows which host their own website and link a feed from there.

i recognize art19 as an amazon thing, and megaphone as a Spotify thing (or a thing which Spotify acquired?). i have no idea what any of the others are associated with. is one of those websites run by Apple?

The Apple thing is the podcast directory: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/genre/podcasts/id26

Most (all?) feeds in there are not hosted by Apple. Many non-Apple podcast apps use this to power search and discovery features.

The feeds - the actual rss files - are not hosted by Apple. But the index of those feeds (the podcast search engine essentially - how podcast apps turn 'Three Dudes Talking' into a libsyn feed url - is hosted by Apple.

> But the index of those feeds (the podcast search engine essentially - how podcast apps turn 'Three Dudes Talking' into a libsyn feed url - is hosted by Apple.

I do not know what you are talking about here. Apple has a podcast index. Podcasts do not need Apple's podcast index for anything. You can find a feed by going to the podcast's site and clicking on it, or googling the name of the podcast + rss. Or in any number of ways, really. Apple is one of many podcast indexes.

So no part of a podcast is hosted by Apple, unless the podcast is actually an Apple podcast.

Most podcast apps rely on Apple's podcast index to power search. Yes, you can manually add a feed in most clients but that is not how most people use their podcast app. They search for podcasts in their app of choice. If a podcast doesn't appear there because it isn't included in Apple's directory very few people will know that they can manually add a feed URL. Or understand any of those words.

it's the list of feeds that is hosted by apple (think of it as a search engine for podcasts), not the actual feeds or media files.

Ah, my app doesn't have a directory of feeds. It requires that I add urls directly.

This would only matter in any way if you think that listening to podcasts is primarily a hobby that people engage in for its own sake. If you think they listen to some podcasts and not other podcasts because they care what's in the podcasts, why would they care if Apple hosts a list of podcasts?

discoverability, if a friend talks to me about a podcast I could be interested in, i'd rather just have the name of the podcast than a full URL. Here i can just use any podcast app that integrates with Apple podcast service and type the name of the podcast i want to listen to.

Your question is the same as: "Why do you care if $YOUR_SEARCH_ENGINE (google, kaggle, duckduckgo) hosts a list of websites?"

You can already find the podcast by name using the normal internet method of searching for it. Where does Apple come into it?

The last search engine to host a list of websites was Yahoo!, and nobody did care.

> You can already find the podcast by name using the normal internet method of searching for it.

You could, but I suspect most people search in their podcast app. Which is where apples directory comes in.

A lot of smaller podcasts don't have much web presence outside of their RSS feed, and often have pretty generic titles to boot.

sure, you can use google or a search engine, look in the results for the actual feeds url (vs just a website or something), and copy paste it in your podcast player. Or you can just search from it directly in your podcast app.

The UX on the latter side is clearly superior.

not to mention that unless the podcast has an official site, a Google search for the feed will turn up 10 different mirrors of the feed, without any clarity about which one's the canonical source.

in the past i've subscribed to a dead feed this way i think because the author changed who they syndicate through. i assume Apple's directory is maintained in a way that largely avoids this (simply by it being the canonical directory).

yes, but the app you used to find that feed most likely used Apple's directory to find it. Unless you went to each podcasts web page directly and picked the RSS feed directly from them.

i think it's a historical argument. i.e. from when the "pod" in podcast meant "iPod".