Pocket Casts — Awesome Open Source
Thanks to Automattic, the strongly open source company behind WordPress, another great product Pocket Casts goes open source! Awesome!
This is a great alternative to my current favourite podcast app, AntennaPod which is available on F-Droid.
Users: FOSS Matters
Quoting Chief TWiT leo@twit.social:
Now that we're learning this lesson that centralized silos are brittle and operate in the interest of the owners not the users...
...please note the move toward centralizing podcasts into apps from Amazon/Audible, Spotify, iHeart, YouTube, TikTok etc.
If you like podcasts, use an RSS-based podcast player. Support the open ecosystem...
My favourite podcast: The Self-Hosted Show (direct Pocket-Casts link to it).
Developers: Progress Needed
FOSS Apps live in FOSS App Stores
The Pocket Casts app is currently published only in the proprietary Google and Apple app stores [1]. I have voted for their “Add to F-Droid” issue and hope that they will agree to do so and that some nice folks will contribute to help make that happen. (Of course there is no analogous option for Apple users, as Apple locks all their users in their walled garden.)
FOSS Apps live in FOSS Forges
The source code and development process of Pocket Casts is currently hosted on the proprietary Microsoft Github, sadly, like Millions of Free Software developers forgot why it matters to own their tools. In my strong opinion, to better serve FOSS as a whole they would GiveUpGithub and move to a FOSS software forge provider such as Codeberg.org and/or host a FOSS code forge at their own domain.
[1] As a techie you could also download it from the release assets section of their app source repository, but for general users that doesn't count.
More: #awesomeFOSS #degoogled #android
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