Ask HN: Apple defacto removed open access to their Podcast index. What now?

11 points

2 years ago

Until a few days ago Apple had a (pretty) open listing of all the podcasts in their index under https://podcasts.apple.com/us/genre/podcasts/id26 - AFAIK this was the base for everyone who wanted to build and maintain their own podcast directory.

Now Apple removed that listing and replaced it with their new Apple Podcasts web app. All the old listing URLs redirect there. Sadly there doesn't seem to be an equivalent, full index access anymore. Only category pages have just a few podcasts on them. And a search. But no way to systematically access all podcasts. (At least as far as I can see).

If this is true I guess this will be problematic for the podcast ecosystem. Everyone who has their own directory can of course crawl the existing RSS feeds. But new Podcasts will probably mostly be submitted to the Apple index (and maybe a few other, bigger services).

I stumbled over this because I just so happened to play around with some ideas for a podcast service. So now I'm wondering: is this Apple misusing its dominating position? And where can I get an up-to-date full index of podcasts now?

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