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Samsung Free App Issue Causes Spike In Downloads & 7 Other Stories
Episode 41
This week: Samsung Free app issue causes spike in downloads, Transistor joins email spam prevention movement, How streaming TV is bracing for the recession, and Spreaker debuts two new offerings, one of which sounds like a cool robot. New auto-playing Samsung app spikes downloads. Manuela: Our top story this week, fitting for a holiday weekend, is one of collaboration and teamwork against all odds. Last week Samsung launched the Listen tab on Samsung Free, a media streaming app pre-installed on every Samsung Galaxy smartphone. When clicked on, the Listen tab would open a full-screen player with a three second timer. If not manually stopped within the three seconds, the app would begin to auto-play segments of featured podcast episodes, with each episode in the queue pre-downloaded for instant play. This auto-downloading and auto-listening lead to podcasters seeing a sudden spike of listens coming from the Dalvik user agent. Like something out of a heartwarming holiday special, the podcasting community came together on a long weekend to work together and solve the problem. In the Sounds Profitable Partners Slack channels, employees of Audioboom, Triton, Spreaker, and others jumped into threads to discuss how to handle the issue. James Cridland’s Monday edition of the Podnews segment The Tech Stuff details why a download spike from Dalvik isn’t necessarily an easy fix. Cridland says: “Some podcast hosting companies have blocked the “Dalvik” useragent entirely. However, blocking Dalvik - even with the Samsung model numbers - will also block, among other things, Google News’s audio player, which uses an identical audio useragent. At least one app powered by Podcast Index also uses this generic Dalvik useragent along with PodcastAddict, and Indian podcast app Gaana also retains Dalvik in its useragent.” Luckily, there’s a happy ending to this Thanksgiving story. Multiple employees on a holiday weekend managed to get the attention of Samsung, a company only just now entering podcasting, and get the problem fully solved. According to Podnews reporting, Samsung Free content partner Acast has since demonetized any traffic from the Dalvik user agent, and a fix to the app to prevent any future download spikes is set to be published soon. What could have been a massive headache for many people was quickly resolved fully without any half-measure bandage fixes, all on a holiday weekend, thanks to the cohesiveness of the community. That we can certainly be thankful for. Transistor joins email spam prevention movement. Shreya: Back on November 3rd we covered Buzzsprout’s announcement that they were removing email addressed from podcast RSS feeds. Presented as the company ‘fighting back against email spam,’ Buzzsprout only inserts a podcaster’s email address into the feed on request to verify the feed with other services and platforms. On August 22nd Apple Podcasts announced updates to RSS feed requirements in 2023, including the end of support for the ‘owner’ tag.
“The owner tag and its contact information, including email, will no longer be recommended.” In addition to Buzzsprout embracing the email-free future, Podbean and - most recently - Transistor have joined the cause. From their blog post this monday: “Unfortunately, because podcast feeds are public, spammers can scrape these email addresses an
Published on 2 years, 5 months ago