Plato Podcast App

I used Castro as my podcast player but the developer wouldn't answer my request for features. I got fed up and decided I would build my own app.

I knew that there's thousands of podcast apps out there, so I'd have to do something completely different. The direction I went with:

• App cannot have expensive back-end cost. Scraping millions of RSS feeds will cost $1000/month and I didn't want to eat that cost – especially if I'm the only user for the app.
• I want an app that I'll use for the next 10 years. This means little to no dependence on third party API just in case an OS update breaks it – I didn't want to spend a few days refactoring code.
• App must solve a problem that I currently have. I won't talk to users until I solve my own problem.

So, what problems did I have at the time?

1. Some ads were annoying. Each time a bad ad plays, I pull out my phone and tap +30s a bunch. I wanted an easier way to skip them.
2. I wanted finer control with playback speed.
3. I wanted to slow down fast talkers and speed up slow talkers.
4. Some episodes were so good that I wanted to listen to them again in the future.
5. When I listen to Vergecast, they usually talk about 3 topics in one podcast. I wanted to skip to a timestamp of the topic I cared about.
6. There's a few more problems to solve, but it requires AI/ML that I don't know yet. For example, I wanted all audio to have excellent quality. Even the ones where the host interviews someone using an iPhone.