I’ve been a Castro Podcast player user since they introduced 1.0, I couldn’t find when 1.0 shipped but it must have been over 10 years ago.
Anywho, it’s a great app and the best podcast player for my tastes. The Inbox where all podcast episodes are collected is perfect. It allows you to choose what you want to listen to and organize the list however you’d like. That’s really nice! The Inbox is noisy but the Queue, where you play them, is nice and organized. Plus the UI is simply gorgeous and well organized. In my opinion it’s the best podcast player in the market.
So, why all that intro to Castro who-haw? Well, once again, Castro has gone off the air. This is the second time in the last few months we’ve lost the backend service and the second time in the last few months Castro’s parent company — Tiny — didn’t say a thing about it.
Not only that but the Castro website has gone dark. If you try to browse to it, as of this writing, you’ll get a website not found error.
The app is still available in the App Store but it’s useless without the backend to support it.
What the heck is going on at Castro, and more importantly, Tiny to allow this to happen without informing their user base what’s going on?
Did they sell it and the new owners dropped the ball? Did they just give up on it and let it waste away to nothing through neglect? As a longtime user I’d love to know what’s going on.
Since it’s still available in the App Store is Tiny collecting subscription dollars? That’s gonna be a real mess to untangle if folks downloaded and subscribed for the year.
So many questions. Once again I wish I were a wealthy fellow so I could buy it and update it so it doesn’t need its own backend to function.
