Pocket Casts has been acquired by the company that owns WordPress
There are a lot of great third-party indie podcast players on the Play Store, but Pocket Casts remains one of the best of the best. Today, it was announced that Pocket Casts was acquired by Automattic, the same company that owns WordPress.com.
If you’re concerned that Pocket Casts will be going away anytime soon, you can relax a bit. Automattic stated the following in the announcement:
As part of Automattic, Pocket Casts will continue to provide you with the features needed to enjoy your favorite podcasts (or find something new). We will explore building deep integrations with WordPress.com and Pocket Casts, making it easier to distribute and listen to podcasts. We’re thrilled that we can continue to give our users a multitude of ways to tell and engage with stories that matter.
Additionally, the company confirmed that the co-founders of Pocket Casts, Russell Ivanovic and Philip Simpson, will “continue to lead”. While we aren’t exactly sure what kind of integrations with WordPress could be made, at least we know that our favorite podcast app isn’t going anywhere.
If you’re still not feeling too great about the acquisition, then we would recommend checking out something like Google Podcasts. This is a lightweight podcast player that has integration with Search, and doesn’t try to throw too many obnoxious suggestions in your face.