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.
