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by parondea 2045 days ago
Love seeing development in the podcast space. One specific problem I've been wanting solved for a long while is difficulty with sharing podcasts with friends across podcast apps. If you're not using the same podcast app as your friend, it's always a pain to manually search and find the podcast in your own app. I'd love a universal podcast url, something like `podcast://<podcast_url>` that individual podcast apps can understand, which links you to the podcast within your desired app, similar to the "default browser" behaviour on mobile and desktop. Has anyone come across something like this?
4 comments

Podcasts are just RSS feeds. Nothing stopping a app registering itself as a handler for the RSS mime type, at least on desktop/Android (I don't know how iOS works here). I doubt most users would have a RSS reader installed at this stage, so most users wouldn't even have a risk of getting it revealed as a list of links to audio files by using the wrong app.
I mean podcasts are an extension of RSS if I recall correctly... I don't see why this wouldn't be possible.
This is a big problem for iOS. My spouse uses the default Podcast app. I use Overcast. Anytime she sends me something to listen iOS tries to open it in Podcasts. When I send something from Overcast it gets sent as an Overcast URL.
In the distant past (2009 or so), podcast://… would open in iTunes or similar, being equivalent to http://xn--rvg. So you’d have something like podcast://example.com/podcast.xml. I haven’t the foggiest idea whether this still works, or how HTTPS might have been integrated or not.