Add/play single episode without subscribing to podcast #4710
Comments
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I suggest we don't work on this. Without subscribing to a podcast, it's difficult to manage that 'dangling' episode in the app without the data structures behind the 'parent', which is the podcast. For example: for the episode that you download, we have to deal with the 'Open Podcast' menu because it has no where to go. I suggest you 'share the episode' with your friend so they can use their email as a bookmarking feature |
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Now that support for virtual podcast from local folder is going to become possible maybe it could be used to allow this :
Local folder for this would really be handy and I think could remove a lot of problem which were making this hard to do? |
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While that would work, it's not really good UX. Users could then not press the "open podcast" button to hear more from the same publishers. Also, deleting the downloaded file would also delete the listening status. In general, to store listening status, we always need the feed as well. I don't think we should add this as a half-working feature. (the reason why we can not really store state of individual episodes without a subscription is that AntennaPod is decentralized without a server that knows all episodes of all podcasts. You can read more about that on the forum: https://forum.antennapod.org/t/newbie-questions/84/2) The easiest option is (as @tonytamsf wrote) to share the link to the episode file. In AntennaPod 2.1, you can add the downloads folder as a "virtual" podcast to have it directly in AntennaPod. Why don't you just subscribe to the podcast and unsubscribe again when no longer interested? The number of clicks to delete a whole subscription is not much higher than the number of clicks to delete a download. |
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You can also just preview an episode without subscribing to it. |
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To be honest I find the use-case very relevant: it would be great if you could share a particular episode with a friend who could listen to it at a later point. Indeed temporarily subscribing is a workaround, but it doesn't feel great as a user (you have to remember to delete the feed afterwards, a cognitive burden). I realise it's currently technically hardly possible to cater for this use-case elegantly, but I would opt to keep this feature request open. |
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Another idea to manage this :
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@keunes thanks for this user centric approach. There is no rush for this feature. |
Yeah, I think that is the only good option we have. Would mean a lot of work, though (hide in episodes list, etc). Also, what happens if someone goes to the podcast page and downloads another episode of that podcast without subscribing? Do we delete the subscription only when no episode is marked as favorite? This feature sounds like it could lead to pretty big discussions about the behavior and quite a lot of confused users |
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Yes removing podcast should only happen when there is no more downloaded episode or episode in favorites. |
Either nothing special (episode gets added, nothing else changes), or - probably better - a dialog is shown saying that they're currently not subscribed and adding more episodes is not possible, offering to 'subscribe' (i.e. remove the 'not subscribed' tag). |
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This issue has been mentioned on AntennaPod Forum. There might be relevant details there: |
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This issue has been mentioned on AntennaPod Forum. There might be relevant details there: https://forum.antennapod.org/t/ability-to-download-queue-episodes-from-non-subscribed-podcast/691/2 |
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This issue has been mentioned on AntennaPod Forum. There might be relevant details there: https://forum.antennapod.org/t/downloading-just-one-episode-of-a-podcast/153/7 |
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Play store review in favour of this:
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I really think that the only thing needed is triggering an invisible subscription for the user when he is adding an episode. Podcast wouldn't show in subscriptions list but could be accessed through added episodes. -> this way there would be minimum difference for AntennaPod and for user it would be as if subscribing for only an episode is not necessary |
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Requested in #5643: ability to open a specific episode when it is shared (especially between AntennaPod users). Possible solutions are discussed there. Ideally support for this is implemented together with this issue. |
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This issue has been mentioned on AntennaPod Forum. There might be relevant details there: https://forum.antennapod.org/t/add-episode-from-podcasts-without-subscribing/1271/4 |
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I recently started using this app and came across this issue, but I found a decent work-around. It is possible to subscribe to a podcast, download a single episode, and turn auto-refreshing off in the settings. I think that's good enough and similar to what other podcast applications do, what do you think of adding a shortcut for doing this? |
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Yeah, I think that's what the solution for this issue will look like. Internally, subscribe to it normally but disable auto-refreshing and put it in a folder called "not subscribed". |
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This issue has been mentioned on AntennaPod Forum. There might be relevant details there: https://forum.antennapod.org/t/user-must-be-able-to-listen-to-the-podcast-without-subscribing/1853/2 |
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Google play users also mention the wish for individual episode search (initially brought up in #5288 but dependent on this issue):
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Hmm I'm interested in this issue as well mainly because of sharing specific episodes with other Antennapod users (#5643), who wouldn't wanna subscribe to the whole feed. (I'd even love the possibility of sharing an episode with a timestamp.) But I think there is a better solution than just internally subscribing to the whole podcast. I think in a way this has to be messy and can not work as seamlessly as on the big platforms (e.g. spotify) since the feed is in a way the atom of the decentralized podcast universe and this is trying to force some protons out of that and I understand the urge to just not deal with that. But I think if that's the wish, that is what should be done and not get the whole feed and pretend there is only an episode. This should also work for streaming and not only for downloaded episodes. How about ...
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Adding all episodes of non-subscribed podcasts to a single "pseudo subscription" would be much easier to implement than half-subscribing to the whole feed. Also, it makes it clear to users that the feed is not actually subscribed to. I like the idea. The main downside (No reference from single episode to original podcast feed, as you already noted) could make it a no-go, though. What do you think, @keunes? |
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Personally it seems bad to me to not keep relation with original podcast and not allowing to easily subscribe to the podcast from the episode. |
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I like the "pseudo subscription" proposal too and I'd hate to see missing a reference to the original feed make it a no-go. How much trouble would it be to prepend a string to the episode description when downloading? E.g., |
I'm wondering if it's really less work.
Indeed missing the link with the original podcast introduces challenges: 'upgrading' to a full subscription involves more steps (move played episode info from aggregated to regular podcast) if possible at all. This should be possible in case you like the episode, and not being able to do this would (for me) indeed be a no-go. Another downside is that it wouldn't have options like 'funding' or other PC 2.0 data at podcast level… So all in all; I like the creative thinking, but it seems to me like more work to do right, and would not allow for all features we currently have and might have in future. |
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Hm yes I see what you're saying, as is said it's gonna be a little messy either way :( Will the whole single episode feeds show up in that tag when you expand it? I think that would leave the impression that you're actually subscribed to that podcast. And I think that's a big con for the user experience. Also you would have to implement automatically unsubscribing from the feed when the episode is removed from queue, everything else seems even more messy to me. And then you have the same problem with played episodes not showing up as played when you decide to truly subscribe. |
That's mostly the same bunch of
That's not possible with the current stats implementation. Subscriptions that are gone can't show up in the stats. Using the single-subscription-for-all-orphan-episodes, that would be more or less given for free. We could even "abuse" this orphan feed to keep statistics for deleted subscriptions (there is an issue for that somewhere) When creating a tempory subscription for single episodes, users will come back to that temporary one and use it just like a normal subscription. They will add more episodes to the queue, download, play, etc. but will then start to complain that they don't see new episodes when clicking the "open podcast" button. Then, when there happens to be none of the episodes in the queue for a while, it will be deleted. Users will then complain that the played state is gone, that they cannot find the podcast anymore, that AntennaPod is broken. I am strongly convinced that users will not get the difference between subscriptions and temporary subscriptions, no matter how large we make the "subscribe" button. Using a single "orphan" feed makes it more clear to users what is going on. It clearly shows that subscribing is the way to go, and adding single episodes is just a secondary workaround with fewer features. |
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About the loss of played state and statistic wouldn't it best to keep them even if podcast is removed and potentially offer an option to manually clean stats and states for podcast no longer subscribed. New episodes not appearing in new episodes list is expected for me. But when opening podcast screen from episode indeed it would be best to trigger an update. Or simply do something to mark podcast as not subscribed (big button, gray background, ...) and not automatically updated so it is no surprise. Besides it would entice / encourage user to really subscribe. |
No, I think if you tap remove/delete on something it should be deleted instead of setting some database field to "deleted". The latter is just not transparent minimalist design. If your subscription list gets too crowded you can already put them into tags to temporarily hide them. And you can not just keep the stats or the played episodes, the data only exists within a feed and you would have to keep the whole thing. |
Thinking about it I must admit it comes close. Please correct me if my analysis below is incorrect or incomplete. (I didn't only look at the if-statements, but everything that'd need to be adjusted to get a full picture.) Things that'd need to be done for each of the approaches
There seems to be some misunderstanding about the approach I'm proposing:
Right, but I'm not proposing to delete the podcasts from the db, only to hide them from the interface. In fact keeping them in the database (but otherwise hidden in the interface) has the major benefit...
... and that benefit is that the link with the parent podcast is maintained. As soon as you subscribe, you have your past episodes data right there (stats, played statuses).
As mentioned above, I'm not proposing a fully exposed, temporary podcast. On the contrary, I'm proposing a permanent podcast that is not exposed, so that users won't be able to follow the scenario you describe. (See also the list with things-to-do I prepared above.) This way we won't have any user confusion. |
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Let's not talk about implementation details too much (counting the number of "if" statements is not really a good measure anyway because many of those things should be handled at a database level. That might be harder than a simple condition when doing it efficiently). Let's only talk about the general way to structure this.
So you would completely hide any access to that podcast, and not show a normal details screen with "subscribe" button? That could make it clear for users, yes. I thought we discussed a normal subscription with "subscribe" button somewhere further up in this thread. Do you then want to keep those invisible subscriptions forever? Or do they get deleted when the corresponding episode is no longer accessible from the UI (not downloaded, not in queue)? When never actually unsubscribing, those subscriptions would accumulate. I wouldn't expect my database to contain episodes and subscriptions that I cannot see anywhere in the app. Basically the same concern as the message by @blauertee above:
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Hmm yeah this would be the only way to keep stats, played state, etc. when subscribing to a podcast of which you heard single episodes before. It introduces the big con of heaving that data accumulate in the database. (to me that seems like a no go without any automatic cleanup procedure) But let's look at the use cases of single episodes, I don't really think that keeping that data is all that relevant. I don't think people use that feature to try out some podcast an then later subscribe, in that scenario people would just subscribe to a podcast and remove it when they find out they don't like it. (That would be me at least idk, does anybody agree?) The use case for single episodes for me are two things.
In conclusion: Only using single episodes when I'm very sure I will not look at that feed ever again. So for these things keeping a whole feed in the database (even for a limited time) would be an overhead of idk 200 Episodes, when you need one. With maybe never even needing the data of that one episode again. |
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About history retention maybe data should be kept and expired if you're no longer subscribed after a certain time. Having an expiration time could allow to enable some convenience. Right no what happens if you unsubscribe from a podcast and subscribe the next day again because you changed your opinion? If all data is cleared it is not ideal but if you keep data for 1 month for instance (or less?) It would be nice for the user. |
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This issue has been mentioned on AntennaPod Forum. There might be relevant details there: |
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This issue has been mentioned on AntennaPod Forum. There might be relevant details there: https://forum.antennapod.org/t/further-home-screen-improvements/2479/2 |
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I skimmed the thread and hope i‘m not repeating something. The share episode usecase is rather difficult, as not anyone even has a podcast app, or AP in particular. I‘m forced to use an iPhone right know so i‘m using Overcast right now, which has a nice solution for this Much more important use case i think is browsing episodes or just listening in for the first time and subscribe later, i think the temporary „subscribe“ without refreshing would work nicely with the already suggested clean up (maybe within download service) if no episode is in queue/playing etc. |
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This issue has been mentioned on AntennaPod Forum. There might be relevant details there: |
Correct. There should be a way to subscribe to the podcast (or at least open the preview screen which allows you to subscribe). But the UX would have to be hashed out.
Initially I thought so, yes. Given that 'keep updated' would be disabled for these, I don't expect a big impact on the database size.
I would say that's quite a technical approach to the problem. A regular user doesn't care about what is in the database. Instead, they care that their played episodes appear all in the playback history – even though they're not subscribed – so they can find back the episode when talking about the episode two weeks later in the canteen at work. ('they' here really is 'I')
In my proposal, the user never taps 'Add' or 'Remove' – they just play an episode and AntennaPod does in the background what it needs to do to make this possible. (This is not un-transparent IMHO; many apps and programs collect and save more data than the end-user sees. Think of all the hidden files that Git keeps.)
This could be a solution indeed. Maybe a period of 3 or 6 months after last episode playback of from a not-subscribed podcast.
That's a different use-case than playing an individual episode of a podcast, so I think should be discussed separately. But it's an interesting point.
This, too, is a slightly different discussion; playing episodes without subscribing is the first technical challenge, cross-app/platform sharing another. (Relevant proposal/discussion.) |
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This issue has been mentioned on AntennaPod Forum. There might be relevant details there: https://forum.antennapod.org/t/resume-playback-on-a-searched-episode/2839/2 |
keunes
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This issue has been mentioned on AntennaPod Forum. There might be relevant details there: https://forum.antennapod.org/t/monthly-community-call/1869/41 https://forum.antennapod.org/t/download-single-episode-without-subscribing/3825 |
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Checklist
System info
App version: 2.0.3
App source: F-Droid
Feature description
Problem you may be having, or feature you want:
After recommending AntennaPod to a friend, the friend is really happy with the application and use it to listen to regular podcast shows, some of them in auto-download, some of them cherry picking the episodes according to the description and title.
I recommend a particular episode of a podcast I enjoy, which she doesn't follow, she says "great, I'll listen to it, but not right now, I'll add it to AntennaPod", but then she had the following reaction "Hey, why can't I add a single episode without having to subscribe to the whole podcast ?". And I thought this would be a nice feature in AntennaPod : not having to subscribe to a podcast which you won't follow or have to unsubscribe to later, and benefit from the "Queue" feature that enables one to "Listen later" to a single episode.
Suggested solution:
In the podcast "Subscribe" menu, when the user clicks on an episode there is a "Preview" link which is useful to listen to it straight away, there could be an other link / button with "Download to listen later (without subscribing)".
Screenshots / Drawings / Technical details:
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