Acast App

» see acast.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Acast built its app in 2014, in Stockholm, at a point when the list of tolerable podcast clients was short enough to recite. The company's real business was underneath: hosting shows and inserting the ads, then delivering episodes to whatever player the listener happened to open. The app was the one place where Acast could watch its own audience directly instead of receiving a download count from somebody else's software.

That first-hand view is why the app survived as long as it did. For years it was the only instrument giving Acast real listening behavior, and a company selling audio advertising needs to know whether anyone reaches the ads. By the early 2020s the measurement had improved everywhere else, and the app's unique value had quietly transferred to a dozen other sources.

On 3 March 2022 Acast published the decision through Nasdaq Stockholm, where it is listed, under a headline saying it was strengthening its focus on the open podcast ecosystem and therefore shutting down its own podcast app. The app stopped working on 24 May 2022. Acast posted instructions for exporting your subscriptions and recommended competitors by name.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the open ecosystem ~

The stated reason was a conflict the company could no longer carry. Acast sells itself as the infrastructure that delivers podcasts into every app, which is an argument it cannot make convincingly while operating an app competing with its own customers. Spotify had already spent years demonstrating the alternative strategy, buying shows and locking them behind a client, and Acast's entire pitch was the opposite of that.

So the company did something fairly rare and switched off a working product in order to be trusted by its rivals. Most shutdowns in this category are a failure to find users. This one was a position being defended.

~ the quiet handover ~

Acast is still operating and still large, so there is no corpse to visit, only a feature that stopped existing. The listeners went to Apple Podcasts and Spotify, which is where almost everybody already was, and the open ecosystem Acast was defending kept narrowing anyway. Two years later Google Podcasts was gone too, folded into YouTube Music, and the number of places a podcast could be heard on neutral terms got smaller again.

Podcast listening in Turkey arrived late and arrived on Spotify, so the window where a standalone Swedish client mattered simply never opened here. By the time anyone I know was listening to podcasts regularly, the app question had already been settled by whichever music subscription they were paying for.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »