Hello!
Longtime fan of Antennapod, thanks to everyone who has helped develop, test, and support! I just switched from Android to iOS and have found recommended iOS podcast apps lackluster. Leads me to a couple questions:
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Any recommendations for Antennapod type apps in the Apple App Store? Features I especially enjoy are the sortable queue, stats, and open platform
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Does the roadmap for Antennapod include any potential iOS development? If not, how could this get off the ground - are there platform specific issues, resource issues, or other factors at play?
Thanks!
I can’t speak for the developers but as an author of other Android apps I can shed some light on the challenges.
- First there needs to be an interest from the devs - if all the devs use Android phones, then it is unlikely that anyone would find the point in building an iOS version since they would have no use for it themselves.
- Completely different platform: iOS is nothing like Android. Pretty much nothing of the existing code base could be reused for an iOS version, so in effect it would entail writing an entirely new app from scratch. [1]
- You can only build iOS apps if you have a Mac. I for one don’t own a Mac, so I am unable to build iOS versions of my Android apps. And if the devs don’t have Macs either, then $1000 for each to buy one would be required. [2]
[1] - You can share code between Android and iOS if you use Kotlin multiplatform, or build it using something horrible like React Native - but AntennaPod is written in Java, so it would be a major effort to convert it until you even reached the point where you could start reusing code - so not less effort than just writing an iOS app from scratch.
[2] - Yes there is such a thing as Hackintosh, but maintaining a hacky brittle configuration is not free either.
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As someone who has contributed to the antennapod, I can say that it was not built with ‘cross-platform’ in mind. As it stands, it would require basically a whole rewrite or a totally different iOS version to support iOS.