Pour One Out For Castro: Podcast Player You Are Missed
There have been signs for weeks that someting was wrong. However, the has mostly worked. So what I would find myself manually pulling to refresh odcasts that didnt seem to show new episodes. No to mention the other times where playback would simply fail. All of that has been put to shame this past week or so as the backend services for my favorite podcast app has gone into full poop its pants mode. To my surprise this made the app completly useless.
Whats the news...
My first hint that it was a larger problem was when I found this Reddit thread.
Is anyone else having problems with the Castro app? I kept getting an error this morning when trying to export my subscriptions, so I deleted and reinstalled the app. Now I get error messages when trying to restore my Plus sub, and the app freezes when I try to restore from a cloud backup.
I've emailed support but not sure how responsive they are so thought I'd check here whether others are having the same problem.
Was able to find this blurb. It chronicles the following items.
iOS podcast app Castro will be shut down over the next few months, according to a surprise post from Mohit Mamoria, a former senior Castro staff member and current partner of Tiny Capital, the investment company that bought Castro in November 2018. Meanwhile, the app itself has been down for a number of days with a database server issue. There’s no way to export your library: the company warns a fix might take some time.
Tiny Capital’s co-founder, Andrew Wilkinson, removed podcasts from his phone in 2021 because they made him “anxious”. Castro was removed from Tiny Capital’s website in January this year; though Wilkinson did post about a forthcoming 'Castro 3' that month, referencing Mohit Mamoria as the company’s contact point.
The co-founder of Castro, Padraig O’Cinneide, left in 2019; the other co-founder Oisín Prendiville, quietly left in Oct last year, posting that he was “sad that my own time on Castro petered out like an Irish goodbye rather than coming to an end in a public and celebratory manner”. Jesse Herlitz, most recently the GM of the company, left in Feb 2021. The app last updated its blog in Nov 2020; and users have reported spotty updates to shows in recent months
... And Finally SixColors Gave an excelent summary.
The cloud database that backs the service is broken and needs to be replaced. As a result, the app has broken. (You can’t even export subscriptions out of it, because even that function apparently relies on the cloud database.) “The team is in the progress of setting up a database replacement, which might take some time. We aim to have this completed ASAP,” said an Xtweet from @CastroPodcasts.
The truth is, between Apple’s solid upgrades to the Podcast app and the rise of Spotify as a podcast-playing competitor, the squeeze has really been put on most podcast apps. Original Castro developers Supertop sold the app in 2018. Pocket Casts got acquired in 2018 and again in 2021. Stitcher shut down entirely.
>The truth is, between Apple’s solid upgrades to the Podcast app and the rise of Spotify as a podcast-playing competitor, the squeeze has really been put on most podcast apps. Original Castro developers Supertop sold the app in 2018. Pocket Casts got acquired in 2018 and again in 2021. Stitcher shut down entirely.
Why Is It That Way?
The thing that gets me is why can I not even export OPML from the app? Why is that action blocked by the lack of backen services. It really has me considering app architecture from a user perspective. Normally I dont care how a service works. In this scenario I have an app on my phone that launches properly and respons to my swipes and taps. I have a stable and fast internet connection. Podcasts arent owned and maintaind by the Castro backend service. If I have those two things then why cant the app just go on the internet and get the latest episodes? More importantly why is there no fail safe option of just get the episode?
What makes me sad is that there really doesnt seem to be anything quite like it out there in the world of podcast apps. It has a unique email inbox like approach to managing your episode queue.
Cant help but wonder how hard could it be to create. 🤔
Happy Coding ;-)