•  Ace T'Ken   ( @AceTKen@lemmy.ca ) 
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    1 year ago

    I’m going to ask a legitimate question and I promise I’m not trolling but this seems insane to me and I have to ask.

    Why in the fuck would anybody use a special app just for podcasts?

    I just go to the website, download the show, throw it on my phone and I’m good to go. It takes very little time I don’t have anyone selling my listening data.

    I’d genuinely like to know what the benefit is.

    •  ijeff   ( @ijeff@lemdro.id ) 
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      1 year ago

      I just subscribe to a bunch of podcasts and it automatically downloads them for me. It handles keeping track of what I’ve listened to and can queue up a variety of them for easy listening like a customized radio station.

      Here’s what mine looks like:

      Screenshot of Pocket Casts app

    • It is just easier, and having a simple ui of different podcasts and their episodes along with their progress is a nice QOL -feature. You can probably get the sam, result with a media-player and some tinkering, but is not as easy.

      Granted, I see no reason to pay for a podcast app (other to support creators), as free open-source options such as AntennaPod exist.

      •  ijeff   ( @ijeff@lemdro.id ) 
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        31 year ago

        It’s worth nothing Pocket Casts app itself is open-source and free to use. The subscription gets you access to some extra functionality. I personally was fine with paying for the app back in the day but am not interested in subscriptions.

    • For a legitimate question you sure do keep countering answers with “I don’t do it so why do you?”

      As for why people use a dedicated app? Convenience. All my podcast are in one place, they get updated automatically, and if I want it they get downloaded to storage automatically too so I can listen to them offline.

      If someone tells me about a new podcast I might like, I can search for it and be listening to it within seconds, rather than having to download it from a website. Plus if I’m using Google Podcasts, playback is synced across devices so I can pick up on my phone where I left off on my computer.

      Besides there’s a ton of open source podcast apps and most don’t have ads or tracking.

      • Because if I don’t understand something, I would like an understanding of what the reasoning behind it is. We get smarter by asking people about the world. I find a lot of issues with people emerge because they don’t think about the reasoning behind any of what they are doing and simply fall into a rut of convenience instead of finding a better way to do things.

        But of course on the internet, people get pretty angry when questioning a behavior they just adopted and never bothered to think about.