Just wanted to give a quick recap of what we've been up to with Castro since acquiring the company.
- I was on an episode of The Changelog. If you have any questions about the acquisition, this will probably answer it.
- I did a Reddit AMA for /r/podcasts.
We released our first few client updates, after Apple finally let us transfer the app to a new account. Primarily we have been focused on the major pain points that people were emailing us about:
- Sideloading
- Theming / Dark mode inconsistencies
- Duplicate feeds, "not authorized" error messages, feeds not updating, etc.
We've also updated every major piece of the backend. New servers, newer versions of elasticsearch, redis, sidekiq, nginx, rails, etc. This stuff hadn't been touched in several years, and bringing it up to date will allow us to iterate much more quickly.
Speaking of the backend, popular podcasts on Castro always update within about 10 minutes right now, and all podcasts should update every 40 minutes at the most, with occasional dips during peak hours. We're bringing these numbers down over time and hope everything will eventually be within 15 minutes, with popular feeds being more like 2-5 minutes. We still have work to do, but in general the backend is way more reliable than it was a few months ago, and the issues people are seeing now are mostly client driven.
One big thing we haven't really addressed is playback issues (background crashes, place being lost, etc.) This is our current major focus. I was hoping we'd have an update out this week, but it's not trivial to untangle everything so we're going to take some extra time to get it right. We've even added a person to the team just to focus on this.
As I've communicated elsewhere, here is a loose roadmap of where we're going over the next few months.
- CarPlay fixes / features
- Accessibility fixes
- Better recommendations / explore enhancements
- Full watch app rewrite
- Some UI / design tweaks to show more content and reduce wasted space
- Device sync for your subscribed feeds
- Episode search
- Support for podcast:transcript and podcast:person tags in RSS feeds
Some smaller features people have been asking about that I can promise we are working on and will come out in the next couple of updates:
- Chapters in Carplay
- Large Interactive / Queue Widget
- Skip outro options
- Clickable timestamps in show notes
- Better episode artwork support
Also, I can share our Android app incorporated Castro search and explore functionality in an update released this morning. It's a small but important step toward Castro for Android.
Finally, if you are a student or junior developer who lives in New York and is interested in podcast apps, I'd really like to add one more person to the team on a part-time basis. Please reach out.
Please email support with any questions.
Thanks for using Castro!
- Dustin