Aplikasi Podcast di iOS 11 tak hanya sekedar mendapat pembaruan tampilan. Dalam salah satu sesi yang digelar pada pekan WWDC 2017 yang lalu, Apple memberikan informasi bagaimana podcast dapat dikategorikan. Podcaster (sebutan untuk para pembuat podcast) dapat mengkategorikan setiap podcast sebagai episode tunggal, berseri ataupun sebagai podcast tambahan. Seperti yang Jason Snell via Six Colors tulis:
New extensions to Apple’s podcast feed specification will allow podcasts to define individual seasons and explain whether an episode is a teaser, a full episode, or bonus content. These extensions will be read by the Podcast app and used to present a podcast in a richer way than the current, more linear, approach.
Tak hanya pengkategorian, aplikasi Podcast juga menyajikan data analitik bagi para Podcaster.
The other big news out of today’s session is for podcasters (and presumably for podcast advertisers): Apple is opening up in-episode analytics of podcasts. For the most part, podcasters only really know when an episode’s MP3 file is downloaded. Beyond that, we can’t really tell if anyone listens to an episode, or how long they listen—only the apps know for sure.
Data analitik yang tersedia di Podcast disajikan secara anonim untuk menjaga privasi para pendengar.
Apple said today that it will be using (anonymized) data from the app to show podcasters how many people are listening and where in the app people are stopping or skipping. This has the potential to dramatically change our perception of how many people really listen to a show, and how many people skip ads, as well as how long a podcast can run before people just give up.