Apple Podcasts: An Infoslob Perspective

Summary

This post provides an overview of the Apple Podcasts app conceptual data model.

As with my previous post, Apple News: an infoslob perspective, this post starts with a brief tour of the app user experience and then shifts to a review of the underlying conceptual data model. The Podcasts app is very useful and feature-rich, but some of its features are not entirely obvious, and my hope is that a conceptual model-based understanding may make the app more useful to you.

A Brief Tour of the Podcasts User Experience

To jump into a Podcasts app tour, let’s start with the world of podcasts that exists whether you’re a Podcasts user or not — essentially the Apple Podcasts catalog (also called the Podcasts store, in iTunes).

When you launch the Podcasts app on an iPhone, you’ll see something like:

We’ll start with the Browse view option because the other view options won’t be very useful until you start adding episodes to your library and/or subscribing to podcasts.

If you click All Categories, you’ll see something like:

If you click the News & Politics category, you’ll see Apple-organized collections of shows such as “New & Noteworthy” and “What’s Hot.” In this case, we’ll click into the This American Life show:

Next we see the show-level details including a show description and ratings. If you scroll down, you see a list of show episodes. If a show is of interest, you can click SUBSCRIBE to have future show episodes added to your library. You can also click one of the plus signs next to an episode description to add that episode to your Podcasts library (without subscribing to the show).

If you’re wondering what the persistent “Pivot: 29. Mr. Zuckerberg goes t…” part of the interface is about, incidentally, that was the last podcast episode I listened to before I started capturing screenshots; your most-recently played podcast episode occupies that part of all of the top-level Podcasts app views.

Once you’ve subscribed to a few shows of personal interest, you may find starting with the library view most efficient. The view makes it easy to review new episodes by publication date and time.

(“Primary” is an example of a station; we’ll revisit that concept later in this post.)

You can drill-down into a specific show to view details such as recent and top-rated episodes.

Continuing to scroll down:

At the bottom of the view, as you continue to scroll down, you’ll see collections of other podcasts from the publisher and a collection of similar podcasts that may be of interest.

If you return to the top of the Library view and click Episodes, you’ll see a list of publication date-sequenced episodes from shows to which you’ve subscribed (or otherwise added to your library).

I usually start my Podcasts listening days with the Library/Episodes view, as the view makes it easy to review new episodes across the ridiculously large number of shows I’ve subscribed to. I typically skim the list each morning, swiping left on the episodes I don’t find interesting and adding the shows I find most interesting to my up-next queue (another concept we’ll revisit shortly).

Listen Now is the final option from the main Podcasts app view. I assume people who haven’t subscribed to a ridiculously large number of shows may find this view option more useful than the Library/Episode view.

A handy option from the Listen Now view: if you click the little bell icon next to “Listen Now”, you can specify per-show notification preferences (more precisely, whether to be notified whenever there’s a new episode from a subscribed show).

If you scroll to the bottom of the show-specific notification options, you can also set some global settings (to be notified of recommendations and new Podcasts app features).

As a final stop on our quick Podcasts tour, you can also use the Podcasts sections of the Settings app to specify some preferences:

Note that it’s probably a good idea to select the “Only Download on Wi-Fi” option, if you don’t have an unlimited data service with your wireless provider.

Incidentally, if you want to listen to podcasts a Mac instead of an iOS device, there isn’t a separate Podcasts app for macOS (as of April 2019). On macOS, the iTunes app is used for music, podcasts, movies, TV shows, and audiobooks. As a result, the iTunes app user experience is a bit of a multimedia kitchen sink. Apple is expected to break the iTunes app into separate music, video, and podcast apps when it releases macOS 10.15; for more details, see It looks like Apple is about to break up iTunes | The Verge.

In the meantime, I find it’s occasionally useful to have the option to listen to podcasts via iTunes on my Mac, when I’m working at my desk, but I primarily use the iOS Podcasts app to manage my podcast subscriptions, episodes, and up-next queue. Overall, the iTunes app provides a great case study on overwhelming conceptual data models and user experiences; there’s far too much crammed into a single app.

The Podcasts App Conceptual Model

Now let’s consider what we’ve seen so far in a conceptual model diagram:

If this is the first conceptual data model diagram you’ve run across, see A quick note on conceptual data modeling for a brief overview of the technique.

Reviewing this model diagram:

• A show is associated with a provider; for example, Recode Decode is provided by Recode, and Against the Rules with Michael Lewis is provided by Pushkin Industries.
• A show has attributes including show name, show image, and show notes. A show is identified by the combination of its show name and its associated provider.
• Shows have related episodes. Each episode has attributes including episode name, duration, and description. An episode is identified by the combination of its episode name and its associated show.
• A show can be related to a category. The category names are managed by Apple, and they are further divided into optional (for the providers publishing shows) subcategories. You can find a comprehensive list of categories on this Apple page for podcast publishers.
• Shows can have related ratings. Each rating is submitted by a Podcasts user (identified by their Apple id). A rating has attributes including the date and time it was submitted, a star count, a title, and rating text.

I’ve left out the Apple-controlled Podcast app views such as “New & Noteworthy” and “What’s Hot” for now, but some of those collections can be populated by queries on the model above. For example, to populate its “What’s Hot” collection, Apple can use a query to determine which shows have the highest ratings for a given time period.

Next let’s add aspects of the model related to your personal podcast preferences.

Here’s an overview of some personal aspects of using the Podcasts app:

• Each Podcasts user has a podcast library; it contains the subset of shows and episodes (from the Apple podcast catalog/store) you find noteworthy.
• Your devices also have a role in the Podcasts model; you can use your Podcasts library from device types including iPhones, iPads, iPods, Macs, HomePods, and Apple TVs (as of April 2019, the Apple Podcasts app isn’t available on any non-Apple platforms).

Going into a bit more detail:

• You can add a show to your library by subscribing to the show.
• You can add individual episodes to your library (without subscribing to the related show); you can also specify preferences, on a per-device basis, for which show episodes are added to your library.
• Your library show and episode contents are consistent across all of your devices; if you were to somehow lose all of your Apple devices, your Podcasts library content would persist (in iCloud), and would be ready to use again when you launch the Podcasts app on your first replacement device. This also makes it possible for Apple to know when (in terms of how many minutes remain) to start playing a show episode you began on your iPhone, for example, when you later resume listening to the same episode on your iPad or Mac.
• You can download library episodes to your devices; that’s a handy option if you want to listen to episodes when you don’t have a Wi-Fi connection and want to minimize data usage via your wide-area network service provider (e.g., on your iPhone).
• The Podcasts app also keeps track of all played episodes; that’s useful for determining when to remove episodes from your library — if you listen to an episode on your iPad, for example, you probably don’t want to later see it in your iPhone’s Podcasts library (although you can add played/removed episodes to your library again, if you want to listen to a show episode more than once). It’s also useful for providing insights about popular episodes; Apple can use anonymized played episode details to recommend popular shows to other Podcasts users.

The model up to this point is probably about as far as many Podcasts users go, in terms of understanding and leveraging the Podcasts app and its capabilities. The app has several additional useful capabilities, however, so let’s dig a bit deeper.

Collections provide a way for Apple to organize its Podcasts catalog. You might see collections such as “History Buffs,” “True Crime,” and “Learn Something New,” for example, when exploring the Podcasts catalog. A show can be a member of multiple collections.

The Podcasts app also offers an up-next queue option. It’s handy if you want to manually select a sequence of episodes to listen to, and it’s the same up-next approach used in other Apple apps including Music and TV (and the to-be-broken-up iTunes app). The Podcasts app user experience for working with the next-up queue is not entirely obvious, however. You can add a library episode to your next-up queue by clicking the circled ellipsis (…) while viewing a library episode; doing so presents several episode options:

In this example, I saw Play Next and Play Later options because I already had one or more other library episodes in my up-next queue (only Play Next would appear if my queue had been previously empty).

To view and manage your up-next queue, select an episode, view its details, and scroll down; you’ll see something like:

Your up- next queue appears after the episode details. In this example, I had three episodes from different shows in my up-next queue.

It’s a bit confusing to find your way to your up-next queue by scrolling down past a currently playing podcast episode’s details, from a conceptual model perspective, but it’s probably a reasonable compromise, considering the space-constrained display space on smartphones. You’re likely to often be listening to an episode when you want to see what’s next in your queue, for example.

Note that your up-next queue is managed on a per-device basis; you can, for instance, have one queue on your iPhone and a different queue on your Mac or iPad.

The device show entity is another important addition in the latest conceptual model fragment above. The Podcasts app lets you specify library show-level preferences on a per-device basis, including your notification settings, play order, download preference, and the limit for the number of episodes for a given show you want to keep in your device library. That’s useful because you may not have the same preferences for all of your devices.

If you routinely listen to show episodes while commuting with your iPhone, for example, you probably want to have all recent library episodes automatically downloaded to your iPhone. If you mostly use your Mac while network-connected, in contrast, you can probably keep it simple and stream library episodes rather than downloading them. Similarly, Apple TVs and HomePods are always network-connected when they’re in use, so downloading podcast episodes isn’t an option for those device types.

Stations are another handy Podcasts option. They make it possible to create your own show collections. They’re sort of like show playlists and also like Apple Music Radio stations in some respects. You might create a Work Topics Podcasts station to organize library shows you listen to while commuting to work, for example, and a Hobby Topics station to organize library shows related to your non-work interests, perhaps to listen to while you’re commuting home or during weekends.

The process of creating a station is a bit cryptic. If you click on “Edit” while viewing your Podcasts library, you’ll see library view options:

“Primary” is a station I previously created; clicking the circled red minus sign above would delete it.

If you create a new station (or edit an existing one), you’ll see setting options like this:

You click “Choose Podcasts…” to display a list of all of your subscribed podcasts (sequenced by the date you added them) and select the shows to be included in the station. Thereafter, when you click the station name from your library view, only episodes (you haven’t yet listened to) from the selected shows will be included.

And yes, I did, at the time of writing this post, have 137 shows in my library; have I mentioned lately that I aspire to become a recovering infoslob?…

About the “Add a Podcast by URL…” option in the Library view above: you may want to listen to (or subscribe to) shows and/or episodes that are not available through the Apple Podcasts catalog. Some podcasts are only available through fee-based subscriptions, for example, and the Podcasts app doesn’t currently have a direct way to support those via show searching/browsing. The ability to add a podcast by URL is a work-around. If your fee-based podcast provider supports the Podcasts app, they’ll probably make a personal URL for your subscription, which you can then add via the “Add a Podcast by URL…” option.

A brief terminology tangent: you may have noticed that the Podcasts app review didn’t actually refer to podcasts until we got to the station and add-by-URL part of the story. Instead, most parts of the Podcasts app user experience are based on shows and episodes. It turns out the provider’s user experience — creating, publishing, and managing shows and episodes — is mostly handled with a different conceptual model, one based on channels and items (defined in XML).

Mapping that model to the Apple Podcasts model, a podcast can be a show or an episode. I’d argue the only unhelpful terminology cross-overs expressed in the Podcasts app user experience are the “Group by Podcast” and “Choose Podcasts…” parts of the Stations Settings screen; for Podcasts app conceptual model consistency, those settings should refer to shows rather than podcasts.

The final addition in the model diagram above is the series entity. Show providers can organize their episodes into series, e.g., by year or to group episodes in another type of multi-episode series. Sometimes providers instead use an episode naming shortcut to indicate series (such as “S1 E3: …”).

Recap: hopefully this overview has provided you with a better understanding of the Apple Podcasts app and how its conceptual model hangs together. In future posts, we’ll explore other Apple apps, including Books, Music, and TV, and see how their overall conceptual models are similar to the Podcasts app model. Despite some historical baggage in legacy apps such as macOS iTunes, Apple’s overall app conceptual model is increasingly consistent.