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Comment by crispinb | Hacker News Reader

Find me an open source app that I can use on iOS, Android & the web, and sync my subscriptions and play state between them, and I’ll be glad to have a look. Until then I am very happy to pay fine developers such as these a tiny sum for their craft.

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Wait, is pocketcasts supposed to sync desktop with mobile app? When I tried the desktop app it didn't do that.

I've had good success with the beta web client

If you mean the web interface, that synced perfectly with the Android app for me for years, but it seemed like it stopped syncing properly sometime last month? (Is there a proper desktop app? I'd prefer that to the using my browser.)

It does for me, but not continuously flawless. I sometimes have to close and re-open the mobile app before it skips to where I left off on the desktop app.

Antennapod and gpodder will work for the web and Android, I don't own an iOS device so I don't know of any solutions for that platform unfortunately.

To add to that, there are issues between the GPL and the Apple App Store ToS so open source apps on that platform are at a disadvantage as a result.

If the owner of the code is publishing my the app, there is no problem as they just own the code and aren’t using it under any license and aren’t bound by the GPL. Similarly an owner of GPL code can relicense it for use on the App Store. Not ideal, but it can be workable.

But that's not the case most of the time. Many apps aren't just one man operations, they pull in contributions from other authors and if it is GPL in any way, it becomes a mess to change that after the fact.

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