I worked for a company that did audio streaming and the problem is that cloud providers' bandwidth is expensive af, only option is to own your machines in a datacenter and negotiate bandwidth prices with an ISP
I'm almost a week late but they don't stream audio from their servers. Your device pulls directly from RSS feeds which individual podcasts are in charge of maintaining and paying hosting costs.
They do have a few online features they run, like syncing your subscribed podcasts and listening progress and whatnot, and I think they have their own index of RSS links for searching, but nothing compared to streaming audio.
Anyway, as of today they backtracked on showing ads to people who purchased the app before it went free. I guess they're claiming it was a bug, which I don't really believe but I don't care as long as they undid making the app ugly.
They do have a few online features they run, like syncing your subscribed podcasts and listening progress and whatnot, and I think they have their own index of RSS links for searching, but nothing compared to streaming audio.
Anyway, as of today they backtracked on showing ads to people who purchased the app before it went free. I guess they're claiming it was a bug, which I don't really believe but I don't care as long as they undid making the app ugly.