“The future of podcasting shouldn’t be locked behind walled gardens,” writes the team at Pocket Casts. To push that point forward, Pocket Casts, owned by the company behind WordPress, Automattic Inc., has made its web player free to everyone.
Previously available only to logged-in Pocket Casts users paying $4 per month, Pocket Casts now offers nearly any public-facing podcast feed for streaming, along with controls like playback speed and playlist queueing. If you create an account, you can also sync your playback progress, manage your queue, bookmark episode moments, and save your subscription list and listening preferences. The free access also applies to its clients for Windows and Mac.
“Podcasting is one of the last open corners of the internet, and we’re here to keep it that way,” Pocket Cast’s blog post reads. For those not fully tuned into the podcasting market, this and other statements in the post—like sharing “without needing a specific platform’s approval” and that “podcasts belong to the people, not corporations”—are largely shots at Spotify, and to a much lesser extent other streaming services, that have sought to wrap podcasting’s originally open and RSS-based nature inside proprietary markets and formats.
Pocket Casts also took a bullet point to note that “Discovery should be organic, not algorithm-driven, and that users, not an AI that “promotes what’s best for the platform.”
Spotify spent big to acquire podcasts like the Joe Rogan Experience, along with podcast analytic and advertising tools. As the platform now starts leaning into video podcasts, seeking to compete with the podcasts simulcasting or exclusively on YouTube, Pocket Casts’ concerns about the open origins of podcasting being co-opted are not unfounded. (Pocket Casts’ current owner, Automattic, is involved in an extended debate in public, and the courts, regarding how “open” some of its products should be).
Pocket Casts started as an independent app in 2011, developed by a two-person Australian team named Shifty Jelly. The app was sold in 2018 to a collective of National Public Radio and affiliated entities, including WNYC, WBEZ Chicago, the This American Life show, and NPR itself, with BBC Studios later joining in. After failing to gain traction or make profit, the broadcasters sold Pocket Casts to Automattic in 2021, with original co-founders Russell Ivanovic and Philip Simpson remaining in leadership.
As Nicholas Quah noted at his Hot Pod newsletter at the time, third-party podcast clients were on the decline, boxed out of the public mindshare by the default clients on devices and the content networks themselves. Except Google Podcasts, the search and advertising firm’s third go at a client, which shut down in 2024 and lateral-passed its users to YouTube Music.
I’ve been a Pocket Casts user for about as long as the app has existed, starting on Android and moving to iOS in recent years. At some point I purchased a lifetime license to the web version, which remained in place and which I used when I wanted to share episodes with others, listen to something relevant to work, or listen on a Chromebook. It’s a reliable bit of software that gets updates and features, and its dual Android/iOS nature makes it easy to share things across the smartphone platform divide.
Apple also now offers a free web version of its Podcasts app. That obviously syncs to a user’s Apple account for playlists and other features, and redirects people on iOS devices to their native Podcasts app.
