Have you ever wondered how people without smartphones can access your podcast—or how big that untapped audience might be? Podcasts are a valuable source of information, education, and entertainment. If you are interested to know how to make your Podcast accessible to billions across the globe beyond smartphones you don’t want to miss this episode. If you want to claim a piece of the 3 billion–plus listeners not using iPhones or Androids, this episode is a must-listen.

Today on episode 50, of the PodcastingTech Show, host Mathew Passy chats with Tom Barrasso, founder and developer of PodLP, the innovative app that brings podcasts to feature phones (“dumb phones”) around the world. If you’ve ever assumed your listeners all have iPhones or Androids, this episode will seriously open your eyes!

Tom Barrasso is a software developer and entrepreneur based in New Zealand who created PodLP out of a desire for digital detox—and a personal challenge to prove that even “dumb phones” could be smart about podcasts. His unique expertise bridges podcast technology and truly global access.

We discuss exactly how PodLP makes podcasts accessible to listeners in emerging markets in  India and beyond. Tom unpacks how PodLP is breaking Podcast barriers with feature Phone technology,, the surprising size and diversity of the feature phone landscape, and why Western podcasters should be paying attention.

You’ll learn about the technical challenges Tom faced building for this underserved audience, how PodLP works on devices most of us never think about, and what this means for your show’s global reach.

IN THIS EPISODE, WE COVER:

• Why Tom built PodLP: How a pandemic project turned into a worldwide feature phone podcast platform, and why digital detox was the spark. (1:00)
• The size of the feature phone market: India, the U.S., and beyond—find out who’s actually buying feature phones in 2024 (hint: it’s not just seniors!). (5:20)
• Why and how feature phone users matter for podcasting: Tom explains why emerging markets are the next frontier for English (and non-English) podcast consumption—and what makes audio perfect there. (7:00)
• How PodLP works: What’s different on a tiny screen, what features you’ll recognize, and why every PodLP download equals a real listen. (8:55)
• How to get your podcast listed: Good news—if you’re in Podcast Index, you’re already there. If not, you might be missing out on millions of potential listeners. (11:20)
• Technical tips & improvements for podcast accessibility: Why high-bitrate audio or huge artwork isn’t always best, and how thinking globally can help your show grow. (15:10)

Links and resources mentioned in this episode:

• PodLP (explore the platform, check if your show is listed!): https://podlp.com/
• Podcast Index (ensure your show is included): https://podcastindex.org/
• NPR Planet Money (Tom’s recommended listening): https://www.npr.org/sections/money/
• How I Built This (Tom’s pick): https://www.npr.org/sections/how-i-built-this/
• Learn more about KaiOS: https://www.kaiostech.com/
• Read more on IPv6 and why it matters: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/network-layer/what-is-ipv6/
• Follow with PodLP on Social Media: Linkedin - @PodLP

                                                                      Instagram - @podlp_app

                                                                      Facebook - @Podlp App

Don’t miss this episode if you care about podcast growth, global access, and the next billion listeners! For more insights and tech tips, subscribe to podcastingtech.com to listen to previous episodes of the PodcastingTech Show.

**As an Amazon Associate, we may earn commissions from qualifying purchases of podcasting gear from Amazon.com. We also participate in affiliate programs with many of the software services mentioned on our website. If you purchase something through the links we provide, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The team at Podcasting Tech only recommends products and services that we would use ourselves and that we believe will provide value to our viewers and readers.**

For additional resources and insights visit podcastingtech.com or follow us on social media:

• Instagram: @mathewpassy
• LinkedIn - /mathewpassy
• Threads: @mathewpassy
• Twitter/X: @mathewpassy
• Facebook - /podcastingtech, /mathewpassy

PODCASTING TECH IS POWERED BY:

• Captivate - Easy, professional podcast hosting to create, grow and make money from your podcasts
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EQUIPMENT IN USE:

• Rodecaster Pro 1st Gen (No longer available). Consider the Rodecaster Duo or Rodecaster Pro II
• EV RE20 with 309a Shockmount 
• Rode PSA1+
• iPhone continuity camera but previously the Logitech Brio 4k
• DCMEKA In-Ear Monitors
• BusyBox Smart Sign  

Well, from what I understand, our guest hears this often, but we are chatting

with someone who's probably the furthest away from me possible,

with the exception of one other we we did, in Australia. We are in New

Zealand chatting with Tom Barrasso. He is the founder and developer

of Pod LP. And I don't think I'm gonna

do it justice by explaining it, but, he basically, has created

software that helps bring podcasts to non smartphones

around the world. And, you know, probably most of the listeners don't know how many

are out there, but I'm sure we're gonna get some really good information about that.

Tom, thank you very much for joining us today. Yeah. Thank you very much for

having me. So were you in the

podcasting space? Like, did you have interest in podcasting

before PodLP? Like, what kinda led you

to wanna develop this software? Yeah.

But, basically the story starts with the pandemic. Like a lot of

people, I no longer had a commute. I had a lot less, to do,

a lot more time on my hands. And, I've been getting into this idea

of, as a lot of people are and we'll talk about the types of users

that that are drawn to feature phones. But, I

wanted one basically for digital detox purposes. I wanted to take it camping,

for weekend trips. And the issue that I had, my my girlfriend made

fun of me at the time. She was like, you'll never be able to do

that because they don't have a podcast app. And because I was a developer, I

was like, okay, great. Challenge accepted. I'll go ahead and build one. It can't be

that hard. So that was more or less when I got started. The

the big issue for me then, for folks who are probably aware of the timeline

was the podcast index hadn't yet launched and so probably the hardest thing as a

developer back then was just getting the feeds together, figuring out how to build a

directory. That was definitely the the biggest,

challenge to overcome. And then I I launched pretty quickly. I think it took me

under a month to actually get it shipped. Although granted, I'll say the very first

version of PodLP was about as unglamorous as you can

get. Didn't even have thumbnails, because I couldn't figure out how to shrink the

images to fit the screen without running into memory issues. So there were a

lot of, issues trying to wrangle the world of podcasting to fit,

feature phones. Interesting. I'm I'm surprised you

say that it's hard to get information on podcast

because, you know, everybody classically, when somebody signs up, you

say, alright. You sign up for Apple, then you'll you'll find yourself on, you know,

a few dozen, other platforms who basically go into their directory.

Is Apple's API, difficult, expensive? Like, what

what made getting the content from Apple more difficult than waiting for

a pod to cast index to come along and, you know, provide this this great

resource? Yeah. So at the time, I think one of

the biggest challenges with the Apple dataset was,

or or the Apple APIs were, they're they're

obviously not geared towards this type of

user segment, and there are a lot of criteria that mandated the

need for a, an API that was specific to

this market segment. I'll give you a couple of examples. I I

gave the one of thumbnails first off. So So that's something Apple actually does pretty

well, but, you can run into restrictions. I know people say

like the Apple API is rate limited. When we go into talking about the the

version of PodLP that runs in CloudForm, I'll talk about why that was a

concern. But perhaps one of the bigger ones

was, for PodLP specifically especially launching in India it

needed to support IPv6 only use. Something that podcasters

probably don't think about. Basically there's two versions of the Internet protocol. In the good

old days you had, IP addresses, IPv4. It basically had

four numerical segments between zero to two fifty five. So a number like

+1 92 1 6 8 0 1. There were I think

4,000,000,000 give or take IPv4 addresses which is a problem because there's more than

4,000,000,000 people, not excluding all of the devices that we all have today.

So, you can imagine that eventually hit a limit and

IPv6 solves that. It has, far more IPv addresses.

The the addresses themselves are far more complicated.

But, and something I get from a lot of podcasters is, well, why why should

we care about this? Right? Because in Western markets, the telecommunication operators will

handle backwards compatibility with technologies like NAT six four and

DNS six four. They basically make it so that IPv four devices

connect to IPv services and vice versa. In emerging

markets like India, they don't do that. It's just too expensive. It's not worth their

time. And so podcasters don't know what they're missing out on.

And importantly, the user doesn't know because they don't, the

user gets an an ambiguous error and the podcast hosting company

never finds out because the user is never able to reach their service, so there's

no error for them. They can't see how much, potential they're missing

here. So I basically had to have an API that was able to account

for things like this and allow me to suppress certain feeds based on the host

that they were on. And had I relied solely on Apple, I wouldn't have had

the ability to to do things like that. Gotcha. Alright. So they they

come along, make it a little bit easier, and and therefore PodLP is

born. I think for some folks, I don't think they

understand how big the feature phone market is. And and I

guess another way people think of feature phones are dumb phones. Right? Not big,

tall screen phones like an Android or an Apple device. What are

we looking at? How many are out there? Where are they popular?

Yeah. How big is this market still? Yeah. It's a great question. So

you heard me mention India. The market for feature phones is still quite

large. It's stable in countries like The United States

where it has resisted declining probably

because of a combination of factors. So right now the Piedl P

market specifically, India makes up the lion's share of use probably about

80% give or take. The United States is actually the second largest

market for feature phones worldwide. I think, last year

almost 3,000,000 units were sold across The United States. So that's one

that surprises a lot of people. Who's buying them?

Yeah, who's buying them? That's a great question. I see probably three primary

markets here. One are seniors, a lot of these devices are geared towards

older folks. The second are children. Parents buying them for their kids that

they want to have restricted use and it's a lot easier to restrict a feature

phone that only has say a hundred apps than it is to restrict, an

iPhone with 3,000,000 apps potentially. And then the third is

digital detoxers, you know, Gen Z, Millennials, people who are, trying to get

away from scrolling addiction and, probably the easiest way that they

found to accomplish that is to remove the temptation by moving to feature

phones. Interesting. Alright. So so you those three populations

in The US, India, so it sounds like a lot of emerging markets,

and a lot of underdeveloped countries where

maybe the networks aren't as strong, but, obviously, they still want and

need, you know, reliable communication.

I guess for a lot of podcasters, we probably don't think a lot about

them, especially, you know, ones based here in The US.

Do you see them being like a burgeoning podcast consumption

market and one that more people should be paying attention to?

Oh, absolutely. I I think probably the single biggest reason why you

should pay attention to markets, especially ones like India, is that India is the largest

English speaking country if you take into account English as a second language.

So, you know, there's over 400,000,000 in English

speakers in India, well more than those in The United States.

And then it's just a faster a very fast growing market. Many

people are coming online at a much faster pace than in other parts of

the world. If you think about the, digital divide for those who

have access to mobile connectivity, you still have about two and a half to

3,000,000,000 people around the world who do not have access to any type of

mobile Internet connection. That includes basic two g, like, if you're gonna

do SMS or calling, like, you get on a a really basic feature phone.

There's a huge huge potential in these markets. And

audio has a a a really strong potential because it overcomes a lot of the

linguistic barriers that you would get in a country like India where if you

exclude English, it's a very fragmented market where you

have more than a dozen regional Indic languages that,

all sort of compete for, you know, pretty large sizes of

population. Right? There are languages in India that have more than a hundred million

speakers that I bet you most people have never heard of before,

and audio is just a much easier format to distribute that information in

because it's easier to, for the user to consume. It's more familiar.

A lot of them are familiar with radio today. So it's something that they're easy

cognitively easier to adapt to. So what's the

what's the feature phone version of a podcast store like?

What is like, what's the experience like on PodLP? Are there,

you know, limitations that

smartphone podcast consumers would would visit, or is it really

just you were able to shrink all that UX and UI

into that smaller screen typically? Yeah. You can

shrink quite a bit. PodLP is a long way from when it first

launched. There's there's definitely thumbnails now, rich search,

categorization for podcasts, feeds that are

adapted based on a number of indicators including geography and language.

But beyond that it's got a lot of the basic features you would expect. So

if you were to open Paddle P today, it'll take you to the home page.

You'll see, a set of podcasts that include,

sponsored content. So that's how Paddle P is able to sustain its

operations, as well as, organic content that is,

ranked based on, as I mentioned, language, geography, and a few other factors.

And, then you'd click into a podcast. It would look like you would expect today.

You have the ability to subscribe. You can change the sort

order. You can download individual episodes, on the

KaiOS version. In CloudFront, that's not possible, and I'll I can talk a little bit

about why that's not possible, technologically. And then,

yeah, you can play, you can scrub through a podcast, you can do seeking, there's

a sleep timer functionality. So a lot of the things that you might expect

are there, but I'll say probably the biggest thing that isn't there,

would be automatic downloads. The platforms today don't have that

capability and that's something that probably shocks a lot of people in the podcasting world,

certainly shocks, subscribers to PodLP. Because, if you think

about it, if you have an iPhone or Android today, when you click subscribe, you're

so used to having that episode ready there for you. But what that also means

is that when a user clicks subscribe, your, download

numbers are pretty tightly correlated to,

the number of subscribers that you have. It doesn't mean that and a problem that

I'm sure everyone in the podcasting world knows, listens are not downloads.

That that is the exact opposite in the future phone market without the ability to

do automatic downloads. Every download that you get from an app like

Paddle P is an organic, listen that is triggered by a

direct user action. Right. So it's it's down not all

downloads are listens, but all listens are downloads. Right? Because there are

some services that, you know, list the

their stats differently, and and it's you know, for a lot of people, it gets

very confusing. What so

because you have access to the podcast index, should folks hearing this who

are like, oh, that is a, you know, big market and my content would actually

make a lot of sense there. Do they have to get themselves onto

PodLP, or are you already kinda grabbing those those

feeds from the big directories? Yeah. Not

anymore. Since the migration roughly a year ago now, Podolpi is using

the podcast index for its back end, so there's no need to submit your feed

directly. I think there's an old landing page for that, but it basically is just

grayed out and says there's nothing that you need to do here. But if, of

course, if you're excluding your feed from the podcast index, then,

it's very likely it won't get picked up by PodLP, and there currently isn't really

a way to manually override that. What would

downloads on PodLP look like in my

stats on, you know, standard hosting platforms?

Oh, the short answer is it really depends on what host you're

using. From the very beginning, I've had hosts that were very proactive. For

instance, Buzzsprout, I think they added support for the PYDLP user

agent fragment back in probably 2020, not long after it

launched. Many posts have been reluctant since then.

So if you're looking at PYDLP download today, you're gonna see probably,

I could think of at least five or six different things. So

it comes from and it's stemmed from the two platforms that PodLP is currently,

supporting, KaiOS and CloudPhone. KaiOS is a mobile

operating system based on Firefox OS. So if you

get downloads from PodLP, and your host doesn't support the user agent, it's

probably gonna look like either Firefox, browser, Linux,

or occasionally Android because some, KaiOS devices will

put Android in the user agent fragment to force websites into a mobile

view, so it's sort of a workaround that ends up misattributing

downloads. And then if you're on Cloud Phone, it's a little bit different

it's going to look like browser, Google Chrome, or Linux and

that's because the CloudPhone user agent,

CloudPhone is a remote browser basically like Opera Mini, but it

runs using the Chromium engine. And so, yeah, hosts will misattribute,

Pinelp downloads, pretty much all over the place. And CloudPhone's

even more difficult because they use, like Opera Mini, they

have a fleet of servers that does transcoding, on the fly to be able

to serve content to these types of budget devices. And so the

IP address ranges that you're gonna be seeing traffic from is much narrower on

Cloud phone as well. Gotcha. So I I have

to ask, are you a primarily feature phone

person, or are you on smartphones and you're just making sure

podcasts are accessible to everyone? I'm on the smartphone

for a variety of reasons. But, yeah, it's obviously they're

quite difficult to use. There's a number of services that I unfortunately need,

on a bit more regular basis. And these

devices, because they're so budget tend to have a narrower

frequency band and because I'm traveling in places like New Zealand, it just

gets quite difficult to be able to have a phone that actually works in multiple

countries. You end up sort of buying a new phone everywhere you go. Although I

do have a very extensive collection of these phones, I probably have, I don't know,

fifteen, twenty of them at this point. That's great. Yeah. You know,

I I just wrapped up watching a series that was, you know,

supposed to take place, like, late nineties, early '2 thousands, and everybody in the

show is using a flip phone. And I'm watching that going, you know,

I I don't wanna get rid of my iPhone. Right? It is powerful. It is

important. There's a lot of things. But sometimes I wanna leave that at home and

just carry a flip phone for people to call me on. I think that would

be so awesome. So we have been chatting with Tom Barrasso,

founder developer of PodLP. You can, take a look at what they're up to at

podlp.com. Tom, before we let you go, some other questions we

wanna ask you about, you know, podcasting in general. The first is, you

know, you have solved a problem for folks who are

not who do not have access to smartphones in bringing podcasts to

them. Are there other places in podcasting where

you would like to see improvement or you're thinking about, you know, maybe solving problems

for us? Yeah. I actually submitted a

couple of recommendations to the podcast index when they were coming up at their,

the namespace, the RSS namespace. Unfortunately, I don't think they

got widely adopted. Alternate enclosures was a big

one. I know the podcasters like to record in the highest quality possible

and it makes sense for the types of markets when you're prioritizing, say,

Apple. But obviously for accessibility, it's just a waste.

People streaming, high bit rate podcasts on a four g feature

phone that outputs to a really grainy speaker are not benefiting from that

quality. If anything, they're just wasting their data on it. So I

think that was one. Similarly with, thumbnails like I mentioned, it was always

unfortunate to me but, because we always focus in the largest possible

device categories, most album most podcast artwork

is 2,000, three thousand pixels in size. That is

10 times the size of the screen that these things render on. And

so, again, it's just wasting pixels here. In fact, I've

had many people when they come to put do a sponsor on PaddleView, they ask,

you know, what does it look like? And they see the scaled down version at

a 28 pixels and like, what? I can't read any of that. Like, yeah that's

the point, you can't read it because, you you you

couldn't, you know, how could you possibly read on on a half an inch, a

quarter of an inch of screen real estate. So yeah I think just getting

people aware, I think that's the biggest thing being aware that there's millions of people

who would like to consume this content and finding ways to make it more accessible.

Technically, finding ways to make it more accessible, in terms

of, yeah, the the places that you distribute on, the the devices

that you consider, and the markets that you, you

know, target. Alright. Have you ever hosted a

podcast or do you just like supporting it with, software?

I haven't hosted. It's something I've definitely thought about. I've just I've

always heard the advice from folks that if you're gonna, you know, start a

podcast, it has to be something that you really love because, especially in the

beginning, it's not a good business. If anything, it's probably more of an

expense. So, yeah, I think I'm just waiting for that idea to come around, but

I've always wondered because I have this platform. Right? Like, I have a place that

I can promote my own material, that I don't have to pay for. So,

it's certainly something that's crossed my mind. Yeah. I mean, with your with

your level of technical expertise on podcast and, you

know, coding, I'm sure you can provide a lot of value,

to folks who wanna have a deeper understanding of what's going on and and, honestly,

not just where we are, but where we could be going, especially with a lot

of the, you know, RSS two point o stuff. So I I wanna ask you

about tech on your wish list because usually people say, like, a microphone or whatnot,

and, you know, you've already brought tech to the table for us. So I'll ask

you this instead. What podcast are you listening to these

days that your are your favorites? The kind that, you know,

whenever a new episode comes along, you are gonna stop and go over there, or

you are not going to miss an episode of that show. Are there, you know,

a few that are just, you know, always on your, you know, regular

playlist? Oh, yeah. And you can tell this probably from my

website. They'll usually be the ones that I'm featuring, inadvertently in

screenshots and other promotional material. So, yeah, I listen a lot to

Planet Money from NPR, and, how I built

this. Yeah. Just the inspiration of some of these stories, hearing other creators

and how they were able to successfully come up with ideas, build,

scale, and just the challenges that they faced. Like, for me going

through Paddle P, I found a lot of curve balls. There's, like, legal

challenges to operating in the Indian market. There's technical ones, like I mentioned,

IPV six. There's a lot of things that you just wouldn't think about if your

sole focus is, the Western world. And so, yeah, it

sort of forced me, to to reconsider that that

view and, yeah, expand my technical horizons.

Gotcha. Well, once again, we have been chatting with Tom Barrasso, founder

developer of PodLP. You don't have to go

over there to submit your show, but you should check it out and find

your show's link and start to put that on

your website next to your other buttons and, you know, show

that you are thinking about folks who don't have who don't necessarily

have a smartphone. I think that'll be a really, you know I I

it's interesting to see it would be interesting to see more of those,

popping up in the coming in the coming days and and years and whatnot. Well,

Tom, it has been a great pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank

you for having me.