The Current State of Podcast Apps in 2024

Two big players and a long, long, tail.

A decade ago, before Spotify fully entered the ring, the podcast app landscape felt like the Wild West.

Apple was the default but hands off leader in the iOS space, which led many scrappy podcast startups to try their hand in carving out a niche with podcast listeners not happy with the offerings of iTunes/Apple Podcasts.

Now, flash forward to 2024 and Spotify has been doing everything they can to dethrone Apple Podcasts and become the dominant player.

Let’s see where things stand today.

A decent place to get an idea of podcast player popularity is from Buzzsprout, one of the most popular podcast hosting platforms. They had 110 million episode downloads across all their shows in March 2024, and they publish stats on which apps and platforms these downloads are going to.

This competition has awakened Apple and they have finally stepped up their game over the past few years. It’s almost three years ago that Apple announced paid subscriptions, and they have been making steady tweaks ever since on making the experience of using the app better.

Where does this leave third party apps?

Podcast super fans are very familiar with Overcast and Pocket Casts, but they each only bring about 1% of total downloads. I had to unceremoniously include them within “everything else” in the graph above.

So what else is in that “everything else”?

There are many ways to try to figure out how many podcast apps there are, but I went with a decidedly unscientific (but accurate enough) method. I simply typed in “podcast player” into the iOS App Store and counted manually all the apps that appeared to be general purpose podcast players that had more than five reviews and had an average rating above 2.5 stars. I went all the way down until the list ended.

107 different podcast players was the grand total.

I didn’t include specific niche podcast players like Apollo, which focuses solely on fiction audio, or apps that are for one platform, like the NYT Audio App. These 107 apps appeared to be able to search any ol’…