This morning, Liz Gannes of Re/Code reported that Apple was on the verge of buying Swell, an iOS app for talk and podcasts.
After the splashy $3 billion buy of Beats, the Swell acquisition is relatively small potatoes, and has all the signs of an acqui-hire since the buy is also rumored to be followed by a shut-down. But even if Swell is subsumed by Apple, I think it's an important acquisition and a sign that Apple may finally be upping its podcast game.
That's because Swell is a big step up from Apple's own podcast app, which I, like a lot of others, have found passable but fairly unremarkable. I've been a fan of Swell, as it's one of the better podcast players on the market, with a nice combination of a sexy UI, a strong personalization algorithm and some decent curation (Swell has an editorial team headed up by Aimee Machado).
It's almost as if Apple is finally waking up from its long slumber, only to discover a highly under appreciated gem in its possession in its still dominant position in the podcast market. And the company may be pulling a Rip Van Winkle just in time, as podcast listenership rises and others are seeing an opportunity to deliver better apps in the face of Apple's continued indifference.
The Marco Effect?
One of those who see an opportunity is Marco Arment, who two weeks ago delivered the 1.0 edition of his own podcast app, Overcast. A well-known developer (Arment was the lead developer at Tumblr, and creator of Instapaper), Arment is a prolific podcaster himself and also a self-professed huge fan of the medium, so it was not all that surprising last year at XOXO when Arment announced he was working on a podcast app.
When Arment finally delivered the app six months past his own original estimates, he didn't disappoint. After just two weeks in the app store as of this writing, the app has a 4.5 star rating with over sixteen hundred reviews (compare with Swell, which has been out over a year and has less than a thousand total reviews). Overcast's rating is also impressive compared with Apple's own podcast app, which has only a two star rating for all its versions, based on a huge 33 thousand plus reviews (not surprising given it IS an Apple native app and has been out a few years).
A Rising Audio Tide
So while Arment may have been a partial impetus for Apple's rumored Swell buy, the bigger reason is likely Apple's continued investment in audio of all forms. The Beats acquisition showed the company was getting serious about music, as the company looks to shore up its weakness in streaming relative to Spotify and others. Swell, which has been called a "Pandora for Talk", could be the foundation for an Apple streaming-centric talk and podcast and service since, after all, talk is going the way of music and moving from a download model to one centered around streaming to mobile devices.
Either way, if the rumors are true, it's good to finally see Apple doing something with podcasts. For a company that has been there from almost the beginning and was instrumental in helping grow the market in the early days by adding podcasts to iTunes which, as a result, created the world's biggest and most used podcast directory, it's been fairly quiet for the last five years. With Swell, it might be a sign that Apple is ready to start innovating again around podcasts.
Michael Wolf podcasts about tech innovation and smart home. You can find his conversation with Ram Ramkumar, the CEO of Concept.io (the company behind Swell), here.
