I don't understand why this needs to be an app. I listen to many things that aren't NPR, and I don't want to switch between BeyondPod and NPR One just to get some sort of curated list. This reminds me of a few years ago where a bunch of podcasts were offering personalized apps that just downloaded the archives and maybe some extra content. I might have paid for the extra content, but I didn't need an app on my phone for every podcast I listen to.
Assuming the killer feature here is that it's curated or somehow personalized, and not just something that plays all NPR shows (the page is a bit vague), it seems like you could replace this with a service that generates personalized RSS feeds on the fly, server-side. That way it can integrate directly into your own podcast-listening workflow, where you might have plugins or some specific setup that you prefer to use.
Podcasts (especially on android) is still remarkably broken for most people. I have installed an app and subscribed to several podcasts for a number of people who are below average in their tech literacy. They all fail at being able to consistently manage the app and get the content they want.
Finding and subscribing to a new podcast, even if they know which one they want and can get to the website is an almost 100% fail rate.
Even for me, discovery is broken. I'm sure there is interesting stuff out there that I can't find.
In any case, I think that between an app that people know to install and and click on an RSS feed that they have no idea what to do with, the app is the better choice.
I suppose you could offer an app in addition to an RSS feed, but honestly I've never encountered someone who didn't know how to download a podcast.
If they are primarily worried about people having trouble downloading podcasts for whatever reason, it seems like they could have saved themselves a lot of work by just contacting some of the biggest podcast apps on the market (BeyondPod I think is the biggest) about making it easy to subscribe to this particular feed. They could make a custom-built plugin that just installs the feed, they could potentially license a special distribution of the app that has the feed pre-installed.
Fragmentation of the audio listening market is really not justified and is not really going to help anything.
Fragmentation is also choice and the potential for new and better things to emerge.
I think the user facing side of RSS and the other metaphors and conventions around podcasts are broken. Discovery is broken. So, I'm ok with fragmentation. Maybe there is a better way out there to be discovered.
It's a bit offtopic but have you tried PocketCasts? I have been using it extensively on Android and recommended it to many tech-illiterate (the kind of people who think facebooking makes them computer literate) friends with relatively good success.
Admitttedly I'm a pretty advanced user, but have you tried Antennapod (available, at least, on f-droid)? It is pretty easy to use and does a lot of auto downloading for you. Once you add the stream it just works pretty well.
Perhaps you can personalize it further than just by show. I've often wished there was an easy way to subscribe to Nina Totenberg's legal reports. I enjoy them, but I don't want to subscribe to all of All Things Considered to make sure I don't miss them.
Well that was my point. I was assuming you can do some sort of curated-feature situation. Whatever customization the app offers, the output is basically just a list of NPR episodes and links to a server hosting them. If you wrote a server-side application that generates custom RSS feeds per-user, managed using a web panel (or a plugin for existing podcast clients), you'd essentially get the same feature set, but it would be compatible with your preferred audio backend.
Both can. Every service that runs under the hood (recommenders, raters, story fetching, login, etc.) is an agnostic API that can be used elsewhere. Some of the auto manufacturers and TV apps were already using a scaled down version, albeit without all the features and services of NPR One
These are public NPR API endpoints, most have changed little since their launch in July 2008: http://dev.npr.org/
There are about 2 dozen endpoints that aren't public, either because they have little use outside the building, they may contain sensitive info, or they are valuable but only available with licensing. I'm going to explain NPR's finances a bit more in the above thread.
EDITs: I'll add that off the top of my head, some of the private APIs that power NPR one are used in at least one connected TV app that may not have launched, and also in some car partners. We built a great API on top of NPR's internal library database a few years back. Librarians tag the people, movies, songs, etc. used in every NPR radio story going back decades. That one isn't yet robust enough to handle outside use, but if they release it it's really interesting.
The story API (public, above) is the workhorse. Literally every mobile/car/web app and all stations and other websites syndicating NPR content use that one.
Assuming the killer feature here is that it's curated or somehow personalized, and not just something that plays all NPR shows (the page is a bit vague), it seems like you could replace this with a service that generates personalized RSS feeds on the fly, server-side. That way it can integrate directly into your own podcast-listening workflow, where you might have plugins or some specific setup that you prefer to use.