Instacast

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

~ the goodbye ~

podcasts had no real turkish moment in the years instacast mattered. the word barely translated, and the people around me were on youtube and music, not on subscribed audio feeds. instacast was also an iphone app first, and my phone was not an iphone. so this is a grave for something that sat two rooms away from me, an app whose whole world i could see but never really entered.

it came from vemedio, a small german studio, and the person behind most of it was martin hering. it launched in 2011, and the timing matters, because at that point apple did not yet ship a podcast app of its own. if you listened to podcasts on an iphone, you went looking for something like instacast to do it.

and it was good. it had the details that the people who cared about podcasts cared about, the syncing and the playback and the feel of it, and it built a loyal following among exactly those people. for a stretch of 2012 and 2013 it was one of the names you heard when the subject came up.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the decline ~

apple shipped its own podcasts app in 2012, free and preinstalled on every iphone. really though, that is the quiet killer for a paid third-party app. plenty of people who might have bought instacast now had something built in that was good enough and cost nothing. the room for a small studio charging money got narrower every year.

instacast did not respond by coasting. for whatever reason, it kept working, a mac version, a rewritten fifth release, an apple watch app that landed only weeks before the end. it looked from the outside like an app still trying hard, not one giving up.

~ the day it died ~

the trouble was underneath the app, not in it. in those days vemedio simply ran out of money to fund instacast and everything else it was building. hering said as much when he announced it in june 2015, that he had run out of funds to keep the project going. the discontinuation landed on june 14 2015.

they promised to leave the sync servers up as long as they could, so nobody's app died the same day the company did. years later a stripped-down offline build surfaced as instacast core, the app without the cloud behind it. mostly it stands as a small clean example of the thing that happens when a platform owner ships the feature you were selling, and gives it away.

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