Despite Apple's Best Efforts, We're Still Podcasting!

If you listen to podcasts using Apple Podcasts, you may have noticed some of your shows went dark over the last few weeks. I'm here to tell you that they probably didn't. Apple has messed up their podcast infrastructure pretty badly, so Apple Podcasts isn't listing new episodes for loads of podcasts right now. It's even omitting them from search results and the podcast catalog. Our show is one of them.

How can you fix this? My recommendation is to spend a few bucks on a third-party podcast client. They're more fully featured and don't rely on Apple's crappy infrastructure to work. I like Overcast and PocketCasts, but there are a ton of other options. Google even has a player for iOS now.

If you use Apple's bad Podcasts app and want to continue to do so, you can make it work as you'd expect by manually adding the RSS feeds for your shows to the app. Our feed is here. To add the feed manually, open the Library tab, hit the Edit button in the top right, and select "Add a Show by URL..."

What Actually Happened?

Naturally, there hasn't been an official post from Apple explaining what's wrong, but my guess is that as part of their push to create a Patreon-like subscription business on top of their podcast directory, they changed how their Podcast app and Catalog work together in a key way that's broken a bunch of shows.

Before this new app was released with iOS 14.5, each individual user's device would check the RSS feeds for podcasts it was subscribed to, either every few hours or when it was prompted by a push notification or manual refresh. Now, I'd wager that they have a centralized and authoritative listing that ignores the RSS feed for any show that was added to a user's library by clicking "Subscribe" in the podcast catalog. These Apple Podcasts-only shows only update when the server tells it that a new episode has dropped. If the server doesn't detect a new episode, no one's app shows a new episode either.

When they pushed the new app to the app store, something in their new infrastructure crumbled under the load of a billion iPhone users and everything stopped working. They probably spent some time jury rigging something for the top 1000 shows to address the bulk of the audience, and now there's a team of miserably-overworked people inside Apple who have been working non-stop to fix this before anyone important notices that their podcast business caught fire before they had a single customer.

Thank You Patrons!

As always, we're immensely grateful that the Tech Pod is a listener-supported show. If this happened and we ran traditional ads, it would be a massive problem. We couldn't communicate the issue to the audience, and we'd be frantically trying to make everything right with advertisers to boot. Your support makes all the difference in situations like these. If you'd like to support the Tech Pod, click here to find out how.