My experience attempting to debug a freaking podcast feed reminds me of how far we as an industry need to go with regards to developer experience.
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I don’t think any of the following commentary is unique to Apple, although they do seem to be notably below the AppAmaGooBookSoft bar for developer experience.
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So the underlying problem is I changed something about my implementation, they became unable to parse my feed, and they delisted me from the main podcast discovery service. This was totally silent. No email, etc, despite them having it and it being in the (broken?) feed per spec
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So after noticing this I log into Podcast Connect, whereupon I get the helpful message: This podcast is not in the iTunes Store. A technical error happened when downloading its feed, artwork, or episode files.
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This is surprising to me, as people who use podcast clients written by companies who can write software continued interacting with the (previously working for years) podcast w/o incident, but maybe there is some fun parsing bug. Finding it is impossible with that error message.
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I then go to their documentation about submitting podcasts and error states, and promptly wished I hadn’t. Their actual suggestion with regards to debugging feeds is to pass them through a 3rd party validator and pray, because they have no first party way to validate.
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I spent 2 hours getting increasingly pedantic about XML validation and resubmitting my feed, roadblocked by their official acceptance process taking a nondeterministic amount of time estimated at 24 hours to complete.
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And so my software is still broken, my users are still annoyed, I have sharply diminished trust in Apple as a platform to do even trivial things on top of, and now I’m tweeting about XML over Christmas vacation because I sure left Java to do that more.
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