Website Player Will Continue To Exist (In Mediocrity)!

Update: I’m no longer planning to discontinue the website player.

In short: my plan to migrate user data to CloudKit proved to have more downsides than I expected, so I’ve decided not to proceed with that plan.

The website also proved to be more useful to more people than I’d initially realized.

While it will continue to be very basic (and kinda ugly — sorry), the website player will remain for the foreseeable future.

–Marco

Website Player Discontinuation in 2023

Note: This is now outdated. See above post.

I’ve decided to discontinue most of the web player’s functionality in 2023 and focus exclusively on the Overcast app for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and M1/M2-powered Macs.

As Overcast has grown over the years, the website player hasn’t — I’ve never had the time or the modern-web-development skills to make it a great way to use Overcast. As a result, only a tiny fraction of Overcast customers use the website. (Which makes sense. It’s terrible.)

The iOS app is what Overcast customers love and overwhelmingly choose to use, and it’s what I love working on.

Due to increased server needs and complexity, I’ve had far less time to work on the iOS app this year. There are so many app features and updates I’d love to work on, but the servers have been holding me back.

I’ve decided to make major changes to the server side of Overcast over the coming months to finally free up more time to work on the app. Not everything will be able to make the transition:

• The website pages for podcasts and episodes will probably still exist, but your list of subscriptions will most likely not be available on the website.

• Any listening you do on the website will not sync with the app.

• Very old versions of the Overcast app (pre-iOS 15) will stop working.

I don’t have an exact date yet, since there’s a lot of development to do. I currently expect it to be early 2023.

The vast majority of Overcast customers won’t be affected by these changes.

For those who will, I apologize. I didn’t reach this decision lightly or quickly. It’s what I need to do to give Overcast a great future.

–Marco Arment
Overcast founder