Open Source Podcasting Client

Automattic acquired Pocket Casts last July, and since we’ve been tapping away trying to make the best podcast client for people who love listening to podcasts.

And!

The team has been working really hard to make those clients totally open source and available to the world, and it’s now happened. You can see all the code behind the iOS app and the Android app, and modify it, make it your own, suggest a change, fix a bug, add a feature, fork it and make your own client, anything!

If your code gets merged into core, it’ll go out to users listening to literally millions of hours of podcasts a week. It’s also unusual to be able to peek under the hood of a consumer mobile app that is this widely used and see how it works.

Audio publishing and consumption is a beautiful complement to the web publishing that WordPress is already so good at, and that Automattic tries to nurture an ecosystem around. I love Spotify and Apple, and I hope that Pocket Casts can do for podcast clients what Firefox in the early days and Chromium now does for browsers — push the state of the art, be manically focused on user control, and grow a more decentralized and open web.

If you haven’t tried Pocket Casts yet, install for iOS or Android, and here’s how to import your subscriptions using a format called OPML. (And wouldn’t it be nice if trying out a new social network was that easy?)

9 thoughts on “Open Source Podcasting Client

  1. “I hope that Pocket Casts can do for podcast clients what Firefox in the early days and Chromium now does for browsers”

    Firefox ended the Microsoft browser monopoly. Chromium is aiming for a new browser monopoly. Chromium is not a good example of anything.

    1. You’re making the common mistake of conflating something controlled by a single entity, like the old Internet Explorer, with open source that regardless of its leadership or governance belongs to all of us and can be transparent, modified, forked, and redistributed.

      We don’t talk about Linux’s monopoly on kernels, or SQLite’s monopoly on self-contained databases, because while each becomes a standard based on its merits and has a market share that bypasses anything Microsoft or Google could have ever dreamed of, they remain responsive and serve their users, are forked when they’re not, and the transparency of the code make allows for others to build on top of them in a way that I expect will continue for generations.

  2. It would be great to see this added to the curriculum for elementary and high school students.

    Congratulations on the new jazz club! BTW, if C.L.B. ever plays there, try to get him to switch to WP and WOO. If there is one person I would love to see use WP, it would be C.L.B.

    WP-4-Life!

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