Launched this week
Parasocial
Listen, curate and share podcasts.
605 followers
Listen, curate and share podcasts.
605 followers
PARASOCIAL is a fast, native podcast player for people who really love podcasts. Get new episodes the moment they publish, automatically download and organize them with smart playlist rules, search huge libraries instantly, bookmark and tag favorites, and share your parasocial relationship with friends. Native on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and CarPlay, with seamless sync and no account required.
The "get new episodes the moment they publish" line is the part I'd want to understand — are you polling feeds aggressively, or listening on podping/WebSub? I spend most of my time on the publishing side, and the lag between a feed updating and apps actually showing the episode is the thing creators complain about most, so if you've genuinely closed that I'd love to know how. Also curious how sync works with no account required — iCloud, or something else?
Parasocial
@podcastbud New episodes show up fast because we watch podping (Hive blockchain events that hosts like Buzzsprout, Transistor, RSS.com, Captivate, Podigee, and Audioboom fire the instant they publish); typically a few seconds from publish to detection. For hosts that don't podping, we're adding a WebSub subscriber next to close that small gap; until then, those feeds fall back to polling, which, yes, is extremely aggressive. But that was the killer feature for me. I want my episodes NOW.
Re: Sync is anonymous: no account, just an iCloud-backed identity that follows you across your own devices.
Dial
no account, iCloud-backed sync, native on every Apple platform - that's a nice combination of privacy and speed. curious how you're thinking about monetization given that setup though - one-time purchase per platform, a single universal purchase, or subscription for the WebSub/podping infrastructure since that's presumably not free to run at scale? the "Free Options" tag suggests there's a paid tier somewhere but I couldn't tell what's gated.