I sincerely hope that Apple never intended to close their directory from third parties and what we’re seeing now is simply a misunderstanding or a bug that will be fixed quickly. This change would absolutely not be Apple’s interests, because someone else (e.g. Google or Spotify) would step up and claim ownership of the universal podcast directory. That would clearly not be good for Apple, because being in control of such a directory has inherently a lot of value.

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