Pocket Casts
Address: 
60 29th St, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA
Website: pocketcasts.com
Owned by: Automattic
Latest news
- Jan 7: Popular podcast app Pocket Casts appears not to be playing well with Supercast premium shows, including those from the New York Times. The reason for the bug is that Pocket Casts doesn't handle private feed URLs that are more than 1,020 characters. (If you're wondering, the generally accepted advice is that URLs are supported up to around 2,000 characters).
- Dec 19, 2025: Ben Cave from Apple Podcasts underscores that podcasts are open by design; and teases us that the platform will "continue to innovate with new features". Buzzsprout's Jordan Blair highlights that we'll see an "absolute brick wall of AI fatigue"; Roman Wasenmüller from Spotify focuses on what he calls the authenticity and loyalty that has shaped podcasting; Shea Simpson from Amazon says that video will continue to evolve; Ellie from Pocket Casts wants to see more podcasters adopting new Podcasting 2.0 features; and slightly worryingly, Megan Lazovick from Edison Research threatens that the Infinite Dial presentation next year might be a musical. We hope she's joking. Tell us she's joking. The full set of guests are available wherever you get your podcasts.
- Nov 25, 2025: Popular podcast app Pocket Casts has added a new feature called ‘playlists’. You can create a manual playlist yourself, or automate a Smart Playlist based on rules. The feature is already available on web and desktop, and is rolling out to mobile.
- Sep 26, 2025: The best feedback we’ve seen about ads in the free version of Pocket Casts: “Because of a small ad showing up, I've decided to leave Pocket Casts and instead devote myself to a monastery in Northern Tibet to withdraw from society and focus on my spiritual path, truly the only means of avoiding advertisements.”
- Sep 23, 2025: A developer called Matthew Brunelle has worked out how to change the code for Pocket Casts to remove the advertising. The apps were made open-source by current owners Automattic, which makes it relatively easy (and legal) to do so. However, the app will still use proprietary Pocket Casts servers; and for now, you’ll need to be an Android developer to rebuild the app in this way. In any case, this seems to punish the company for making the apps open-source, which has accelerated a number of new features. Better to use AntennaPod or Apple Podcasts... or, better still, support the developers by paying for it, we think.
Data credits: Google Maps, Podnews newsletter