There is a new iOS app update available in the App Store right now. I feel this update requires some context so I want to give some information on what's going on with Castro and what's coming down the pike in the near future.
Ads Portal
We've been testing a new self-serve ad portal on Castro for a month or so. It's been well-received, and there's a lot of appetite for advertising podcasts on Castro. The offering is basic for now, but we'll have more updates on this soon. If you have a podcast to promote, please give it a try.
iOS 2024.7
Today's update is the last of what I would call the "foundational" releases we've been doing. The next few updates should be more product-focused and will start to include real changes to the UX. But for today we still have to eat our vegetables.
- This release overhauls some core parts of the app. We're moving off of older, long-deprecated iOS APIs. Modernizing will allow us to iterate. We really couldn't justify building more features on top of things like PlayableContent, deprecated since iOS 14. You will notice a new launch screen as a result of this change, but the more significant near-term impact is going to be to CarPlay. Expect to see a fully rewritten CarPlay app with chapter support in time for iOS 18.
- 2024.7 also includes a complete rewrite of the way the app deals with podcast artwork. The new image infrastructure will improve overall app performance and use disk space much more efficiently. We get recurring questions about disk space, and while podcast artwork isn't the only culprit, it is a big contributor. In terms of this update, you will notice a few improvements such as embedded artwork showing up in the mini player, widget images loading more consistently, higher-res artwork on the playback screen, and more.
- Under the hood, this release makes the app aware of many core podcast feed elements that Castro is currently lacking or hiding. I may write a separate post on some of the backend changes but 2024.7 includes support for episode artwork, season/episode numbers, and various other podcast features that we've had on the backend for a bit but the client is not showing yet. They just need a bit of time to bake in the app before we show them in the product. I've attached an image below showing the missing details. The design is not necessarily what we will bring to Castro but it's important we add all this information to the UI.
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- In addition to the above, we've spent weeks debugging and testing playback to address a number of complaints we've gotten including failures to play certain episodes, CarPlay crashes, lost place, lost playback speed, etc. Unfortunately, there's not a single cause and no silver bullet, but we're currently testing several fixes, either with a feature flag in this current release or held back internally. We'll keep iterating on this but we're definitely moving toward a better place. Nothing in the app is more important than actually playing your podcasts so we really want that to be perfect.
Additional Notes
I want to note that the number of changes we're making in this release and the next one are likely going to result in some regressions. The first commit in Castro's repo is from November 17, 2014, so there are some dusty corners and we're going to have to break some eggs. Bear with us and hopefully the brave TestFlight users will continue to protect most of you. They've done a masterful job over the past two weeks.
Finally, a few people have reached out asking how they can help support Castro. We have a select group of loyal fans, and their retention numbers are very good, but we don't have a massive userbase outside of our premium users. If you want to help, the main thing we need is users and mindshare. Tell your friends to try Castro again. Write your favorite podcasts/tech bloggers and ask them to link to us on their websites and talk about us on their shows. Every marginal user makes the platform more viable and justifies putting more investment and resources into making the app better.
Thanks for reading and look out for more updates in the near future.