The once-popular third-party podcast app Castro was seemingly shut down this weekend after earlier saying it was “actively looking for a new home” for its product. The announcement followed rumors that the company would soon be shutting down, prompted by a post from former employee of Castro Mohit Mamoria who in November wrote in X that the application will be closed in the next two months.
In a suspension on castro.fm, Castro’s team in December apologized for app downtime due to a recent topic that took “extensive work” to fix and noted that any communication about the app’s future outside of Castro himself was “not official” and “did not represent Castro’s views” — an indirect reference to the X post that had sparked a number of media reports about the app’s impending shutdown;
The company also confirmed that while it had seen employee walkouts, it wanted to apologize for “unnecessary panic that may have arisen from these conversations.” The post further noted that Castro was looking for new owners for his podcast app in order to continue providing users with services. However, TechCrunch’s requests for comment at the time of this initial report were not returned.
Reddit users were the first to notice the current outage with the Casto app, saying the weekend that the app will no longer load new podcasts or export existing ones — meaning they won’t be easily migrated to another app. Several also expressed frustration at the lack of transparency from the app’s makers, noting that they would have appreciated a warning that the app was being shut down.
“Why all the silence and secrecy? It’s a huge slap in the face to the people who have paid for and promoted the app for years,” wrote one standout Reddit user. z-money-swindlers.
Castle sold the majority stake to Dribble owner Tiny in 2018, but its creators said at the time that they were still shareholders and would continue to work on the app full-time. Citing the reasons for the sale, they said the app had grown to a size where the demands of running the business had pulled them in too many different directions and Tiny would provide them with more resources, contacts and expertise.
Castro’s website was also down on Monday morning, but a tweet from the company clarified Monday evening that the DNS problems it claimed to have experienced had now been resolved and users should be able to access again. Some users were still suspicious of the timing, however, since the company didn’t make any announcements on X when the website and app first went down.
The patch has been developed and distributed for the past couple of hours.
Many of you may have gotten access back.
We are waiting for the spread to reach 100%. pic.twitter.com/kxx7Hdyp4l— Castro Podcasts (@CastroPodcasts) January 8, 2024
Concerns about Castro’s future, and the fate of the independent podcast app industry as a whole, have widened in recent years as Spotify entered the market to compete with Apple Podcasts. This move affected the exits of other smaller podcast apps, which included the sale of Pocket Casts to a syndicated radio show, including NPR and BBC Studios. The app was then sold again to WordPress.com owner Automattic in 2021. Satellite radio provider and Pandora owner SiriusXM also bought podcast app Stitcher in 2020 for $325 million. This leaves the market with fewer third-party apps outside of the tech giants, with Overcast, Podbean and a few others remaining.
Another request for comment from the owner of Casto Tiny was not returned at the time of writing.
Article updated, 1/8/24, 6:45 p.m. pt. Note Castro claimed that DNS issues had affected his site.
