Amaya Toman After considerable delays, Apple is finally launching a paid version of its native Podcasts today. The Podcasts service as such is nothing new at Apple, so in this article we will summarize the history of its development from the very beginning to the recent news.
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Adam Kos Apple entered the waters of podcasts at the end of June 2005, when it introduced this service in iTunes 4.9. The newly introduced service allowed users to discover, listen to, subscribe to and manage podcasts. At the time of its launch, Podcasts within iTunes offered more than three thousand programs of various topics with the option of listening on a computer or transferring to an iPod. "Podcasts represent the next generation of radio broadcasting," said Steve Jobs at the time of the launch of this service.
The end of iTunes and the birth of a full-fledged Podcasts application
Podcasts were part of the then native iTunes application until the arrival of the iOS 6 operating system, but in 2012 Apple presented its iOS 6 operating system at its WWDC conference, which also included the separate Apple Podcasts application on June 26 of the same year. In September 2012, as part of a software update, separate native Podcasts were also added for the second and third generation Apple TV. When the 2015th generation Apple TV was released in October 4, despite the present icon, it lacked the ability to play podcasts – the Podcasts application only appeared in the tvOS 9.1.1 operating system, which Apple released in January 2016.
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In the second half of September 2018, the Podcasts application also arrived on the Apple Watch as part of the watchOS 5 operating system. In June 2019, Apple introduced its macOS 10.15 Catalina operating system, which removed the original iTunes application and then split it into separate Music, TV and Podcasts applications.
Apple has been steadily improving its native Podcasts, and earlier this year speculation began to emerge that the company was planning its own paid podcast service along the lines of TV+. These speculations were finally confirmed at this year's spring Keynote, when Apple presented not only a brand new version of its native Podcasts, but also the aforementioned paid service. Unfortunately, the launch of the new version of native Podcasts was not without problems, and Apple eventually had to postpone the launch of the paid service as well. It is officially put into operation today.
