Thanks to everyone who supported us. We met a crucial milestone and decided to make the app completely free. You can choose to support us with our new supporter tier, but every feature remains behind the gate, and it's going to stay that way. If you haven't tried the best podcast player around, now is your chance. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pa...
Lancepilot
Parasocial
@odeth_negapatan1 Thanks! It truly is. I built this app because I'm a paying user of almost every single app in the ecosystem, and I was still unimpressed with the pace of development around podcast listening in general. There are so many good ones out there, but none that do it all. I hope this one does, and I'll keep building. Thanks again.
The "get new episodes the moment they publish" line is the part I'd want to understand — are you polling feeds aggressively, or listening on podping/WebSub? I spend most of my time on the publishing side, and the lag between a feed updating and apps actually showing the episode is the thing creators complain about most, so if you've genuinely closed that I'd love to know how. Also curious how sync works with no account required — iCloud, or something else?
Parasocial
@podcastbud New episodes show up fast because we watch podping (Hive blockchain events that hosts like Buzzsprout, Transistor, RSS.com, Captivate, Podigee, and Audioboom fire the instant they publish); typically a few seconds from publish to detection. For hosts that don't podping, we're adding a WebSub subscriber next to close that small gap; until then, those feeds fall back to polling, which, yes, is extremely aggressive. But that was the killer feature for me. I want my episodes NOW.
Re: Sync is anonymous: no account, just an iCloud-backed identity that follows you across your own devices.
Dial
no account, iCloud-backed sync, native on every Apple platform - that's a nice combination of privacy and speed. curious how you're thinking about monetization given that setup though - one-time purchase per platform, a single universal purchase, or subscription for the WebSub/podping infrastructure since that's presumably not free to run at scale? the "Free Options" tag suggests there's a paid tier somewhere but I couldn't tell what's gated.