Podcasts

Serious question. Why would anyone pay for a podcast client? What are you getting? It's not podcasts.....

Of course using what works for you, when other things don't is an ultimate decider. No problem with that.

Some problems with this.

Depends on the 'independent developers', and what you are 'supporting'. If a paid for model ensures a team that manages maintenance and updates, and drives innovation, that's all good. But is that money being spent in the right ways for your requirements?

Application development with a closed source model has hazards for the user. You don't know what they are doing in their code...which you are choosing to run on, and possibly compromise, your device. With pay to use, your usage can be curtailed against your wishes...the cost of entry can go up, you can be denied access, there can be tiers of functionality and access, almost always measures will be taken to lock in your useage/data (and ensure your continued loyalty), the whole thing can be sold to someone else who may decide to discontinue or change your access or increase the cost to you. It may be developed in a direction to serve the aspirations of the 'owner'.

Pocket casts released it's code as open source in late 2022, after its purchase by Automattic (the wordpress parent company), having being previously owned by a collective of public radio groups (including NPR and BBC studios). There is no recent history of independent developer involvement (depending on your definition of independent, I mean independent of you, definitely). The development is maintainer (owner) driven. Sync is proprietary, and requires a plus account. Plus account pricing has gone from $7.99 per year, to $14.99 per year, and is now around at $40 per year.

Antennapod is community developed and maintained, has always been open source, requires no subscription - all features are available to all, maintenance and features are developed in the open by the community. Sync is through the open gpodder protocol available to self-host or hosted, and to all apps that support that. You can, if you wish, donate to the project but the project has this note on donations

Of course you may have a view on what works best for you, which is totally fine...but there is a value in understanding what freedom and support for developers you are actually providing, if that is a driver for you.

Which by your own admission is not very much at all.

Which is fine, most people passively take the easy option to be commodified. For reasons that they are told. Overlooking the things that they are not told.

Nobody is making a buck out of offering you actual freedom and self-determination. Usually the opposite.

No, but other people can, and therefore do....and the larger a community, the more scrutiny it falls under, and the more secure and maintained it becomes. Open source code doesn't necessarily mean that it is scrutinised, but it guarantees that it can be.

I have a piece of software on my phone (open source) that takes device activity notifications and pushes them to an xmpp address of my choice. If I run out of the box android, and 'ordinary' apps there is a constant stream of notifications as the various applications take advantage of processing on my phone, and of my network connection, and of the permissions extended to them, to do very many things. Most of which I have absolutely no direct knowledge of. I have a pretty clear idea what in general they are doing, but not the specifics...it's highly complex and interwoven....and is mostly not doing things for me and my usage requirements. It's an avalanche, and completely impossible to adequately monitor, interpret, and control.

Taking a de-googled android, and only using open source apps, for equivalent functionality, and the phone activity slows to an almost standstill. The only notification activity is if a text, email, phone call, or message, is incoming. In all of those cases I have expressly given permission for those, and I can see exactly what is happening, and why. I can trace cause and effect, and monitor the response made by my phone. A less bleeding edge phone, gives substantially improved performance over a stock phone. Because it is running substantially fewer unneeded (by me) processes.

There is nothing that inherently makes an open source project be programmed 'better' or more 'ethically' or more focussed on end user benefit.

But it turns out, if you choose a reasonably 'popular' project, with a good number of eyes on it, that they just tend to be. By orders of magnitude, rather than just by fractions.

Often these are function over form...commercial apps very often have much nicer user interfaces (it's where a lot of development actually goes, because it's the shop window, the marketing, the lure, the bait)...because this is what the user sees, and for many provides the significant differentiator. They may use massively more resources, and sell your being, arse first, to big business....but SHINY!

So are you sure that 'quality' is in terms of all quality considerations? (tightness/efficiency of code, maintainability and security of both the code itself but also its dependencies, resource consumption, expandability, functionality, connectivity, avoiding redundancy or obsolescence, user control, interface)

Price is irrelevant - except in making a personal value based judgement. Note that price is different to cost. Open source is not a synonym for no cost, it is a guarantee of freedom (nobody can stop you using the code as it is now, you can further develop it if you wish) - that may come at a price (effort or financial investment). Most commercial projects price based on demand and user inertia - not 'cost'. Many closed source applications provide information (that stream of unidentifiable notification activity) to assist in maximising the on demand pricing - for themselves, and for commercial partners. That's how phone ecosystems are set up to work.

As for trust...can you really make a consensual choice in that, when you don't know who they are, and you don't know what they are doing to you? I think a better word might be 'faith'. You have invested your faith in the structures to work for you....because from what you can see it looks like they do.

I'll take that as a no.

I don't care what app it is, when I invite it in to my home phone I expect it to treat it with respect, and to do what it says that it will, not meddle with my other stuff for it's own advancement.

I am not a faith based organism.