The result is wherever.audio, which you can try right now at the link above.
How it works: It's a progressive web app that stores all your subscriptions and data locally in your browser using IndexedDB. Add it to your home screen and it feels native. Works offline with downloaded episodes. No central server storing your data—just some Cloudflare/AWS helpers to smooth out browser limitations.
What makes it different:
- True local-first: Your data stays on your device
- Custom feeds: Add any RSS feed, not just what's in a directory
- On-device search: Search across all feeds and episodes, including your custom ones
- Podcasting 2.0 support: Chapters, transcripts, funding tags, and others
- Auto-generated chapters: For popular shows that don't have them
- AI-powered discovery: Ask questions to find shows and episodes (this feature does send queries to a 3rd party API, and also uses anonymized analytics while we work out the prompts)
- Audio-guided tutorials: Interactive walkthroughs with voice guidance and visual cues
The basics work well too: Standard playback features, queue management, speed controls, etc.
I'm really interested in feedback—this is more passion project than business right now. I've been dogfooding it as my daily podcast app for over a year, and I'm open to exploring making it a business if people find it valuable. Curious if there are unmet needs that a privacy-focused, open web approach could address.
Found a bug:
- Search for a podcast creator
- Click on a result
- A modal will pop up with a list of episodes
- Click the title of the episode
Expected details of that episode. Instead the modal is dismissed and I see the search results again.
Note that if I click View Details to go to the creator page, a similar list of episodes show up and clicking the title of those opens up a modal with episode information as I would expect.
Am on Firefox Nightly on GrapheneOS
https://github.com/Podcastindex-org/podcast-namespace/blob/m...
I really appreciate the local-first, self-contained but very portable architecture, with an optional server connection to handle CORS and index and whatnot; that's a really solid approach.
Hopefully this isn't too annoying, but I saw you open-sourced what looks like the backend, do you have any plans/interest to open-source the front end as well, for people who might want to self-host?
I don't see iOS 14 in the list of simulators that ships with XCode, so this could be a challenge to reproduce.
Another option: try another browser. So if you're using Safari, try e.g. Chrome or Firefox.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/downloading-...
> The iOS 15.0 simulator runtime is not supported on macOS 15.6.1.
Downloading it now, will see what happens.
Also personally I do not prefer to play podcasts with a podcast app. I just want it to download the files to a directory which I then sync with another audio player. Does your app make that workflow easy?
Fun sidenote, what you're describing is how the first podcast apps worked back in the day!
It took me about 3 minutes to add to my home screen, export a opml from pocket casts and import it to whatever.
Having offline downloads, ability to adjust playback speed etc is really cool too.
Nice work!
I'm on my phone now, so I'm curious to see how it looks on a browser. Obviously syncing of podcasts / listening positions is not going to work, by design?
The AI search is actually kind of cool for discovering podcasts too, I kind of rolled my eyes a bit when I read it, but it actually worked ok for a query I tried, and I do find it difficult to find new podcasts.
> Obviously syncing of podcasts / listening positions is not going to work, by design?
Not sure, can you say more? Quick potential answers in the meantime.
For syncing, there's an auto-sync that runs in the background and prioritizes the shows that you've listened to most in the past month, but eventually cycles through all podcasts that you follow. There's also a manual sync on the Following page.
For listening positions, there's a Queue where you can drag individual episodes up and down to change the order, and playback will automatically cycle to the next episode in the queue when the playing episode finishes.