Plenty of issues and pull requests have been filed over the past few months in preparation for the announcement, and now users and developers can contribute to the projects to suggest new features, and bug fixes to make the app better. The company has opted to open source the apps under the Mozilla Public License (MPL 2.0). The source code for the Pocket Casts mobile apps for iOS and Android have been released on GitHub, each version has its own repository. Since this is a completely optional add-on, you can just ignore it and use the mobile versions for free. The premium plans start at a price of $0.99 a month, and costs $9.99 for a yearly subscription (before taxes). It offers extra features such as 10GB of cloud storage, themes, folders for organizing your podcasts, desktop apps for Windows and Mac, and Apple Watch playback. It's good to see someone go head on to compete with the bigwigs.Īutomattic says that it will continue supporting its premium subscription, Pocket Casts Plus. It explained that it wants to support a diverse ecosystem of third-party clients, as the reason for making the apps open source. It is not surprising considering that the mobile apps have been open sourced now, because the company's other products, Simple Note and WordPress are also open source.Ī blog post that announced the news on Automattic's website says that the company does not want podcasting to be controlled by Apple and Spotify. The journey didn't end there, Automattic acquired Pocket Casts in 2021. Pocket Casts mobile apps are now open source

NPR acquired the rights for Pocket Casts in 2018, and a year later, the podcast apps were made free when the company introduced a premium monthly subscription called, Pocket Casts Plus.

Pocket casts apple watch