Why we built RSS publishing into Podcastr, and how it actually works
Last autumn, a creator emailed us: 'I spent three hours yesterday juggling Buzzsprout, then Spotify, then Apple, uploading the same episode three times. Why can't I just publish once?' That message sat on my desk for two weeks. It's the kind of complaint you hear often in podcasting, but it haunted me because it exposed a real gap in how we'd designed the app.
The fragmentation problem nobody talks about
Podcasting has become easier to start, harder to distribute. You can record an episode in 20 minutes now. But then you're stuck: your files live in one place, your RSS feed lives in another, Spotify has its own submission portal, Apple wants you to use Podcasts Connect, and Google has yet another interface. Most creators end up batch-uploading the same content multiple times each month.
We kept hearing the same pain point from our early users. They'd record and edit in Podcastr, generate clips for Instagram and TikTok, create show notes with a few taps. Then they'd hit the publish screen and think, 'Now I have to spend 30 minutes doing this three more times on other platforms.' Some of them just… didn't. Episodes sat unpublished for days because the friction between finishing the work and actually getting it live was too high.
That's when we decided RSS 2.0 publishing had to be native to the app, not an afterthought or a bolt-on feature.
How RSS actually gets your podcast to Spotify
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's an XML file, essentially a standardised list that says, 'Here's my latest episode, here's the audio file, here's the metadata.' Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts all read from this same file. You give them the URL once during setup. After that, they check in regularly (usually every few hours) and pull down anything new.
Inside Podcastr, when you finish recording and hit publish, here's what happens. Your episode, transcription, show notes, cover art, and guest details all flow into a single data structure. The app generates your RSS 2.0 feed in the correct format. Spotify has strict requirements: image sizes, category tags, explicit content flags. We validate against those specs automatically so you don't upload something that breaks on their end.
Then the feed gets hosted on our servers. You get a unique RSS URL. You paste that URL into Spotify's podcast submission form once, during onboarding. You do the same for Apple and Google. After that, every time you publish an episode in Podcastr, it appears in all three platforms within a few hours. One publish button. Three destinations. No manual re-uploading.
The small detail that took longer than expected
Here's where I'll be honest about what building this taught us: RSS looks simple on paper, but the platforms have quirks you only discover by testing against live feeds. Spotify, for instance, has specific requirements around explicit content tagging that differ slightly from Apple's standard. Google Podcasts (which now feeds into YouTube Music) has its own validation rules. If your RSS is malformed in subtle ways, it might work in one place and silently fail in another, and you won't know for hours.
During our private launch week, we published a test episode and watched three different rejection emails come back from three different platforms, each one complaining about a different element of the feed. It wasn't broken, exactly. It was just that we hadn't anticipated how strictly each platform would enforce their interpretation of the RSS 2.0 spec.
So we built in automated validation that runs before you publish. It checks your episode against Spotify's requirements, Apple's requirements, and Google's. If something's off, you get a clear flag in the app and a simple explanation of how to fix it. No guessing. No trial and error across multiple platforms.
Why RSS matters more than you might think
A lot of newer creators assume distribution is automatic now. Submit your podcast once, and you're everywhere. But the truth is RSS is still the standard. It's unsexy. It's been around since the early 2000s. But every major platform still relies on it, which means once your RSS is set up, you own that distribution. You're not locked into any one platform's ecosystem.
That independence matters. If Spotify changes their algorithm tomorrow and you decide to promote Apple instead, your episodes are already there. If you want to start a second podcast, you create a new RSS feed. You're not starting from zero with submissions and waiting periods on each platform. You just publish and the networks pick it up.
We built RSS publishing as a free feature because we think it should be table stakes for any podcast app worth using. Whether you're on the free tier (three episodes to test the waters) or a paid tier with advanced transcription and guest management, RSS publishing is included. It's the minimum requirement for a podcast creator app in 2024.
The real work happens before publish
Here's what often gets overlooked in the distribution conversation: the metadata matters more than the distribution method. Spotify's algorithm doesn't care that you published through RSS versus a direct upload. What it cares about is your show description, episode titles, cover art quality, and consistency of publishing. That's where creators actually gain ground.
In Podcastr, we've woven this in throughout the app. When you record, our transcription pulls out key moments automatically. You can turn those into show notes in seconds. Your cover art can be designed or uploaded right in RecordView so you're not hunting for it later. You can add guest details, which means when you eventually scale to our Pro tier and use the NFC Guest Passport, those bios and social links are already in your system. By the time you hit publish, all the metadata is done.
That's why RSS publishing in Podcastr feels so smooth compared to the old three-step process. You're not waiting until after recording to think about distribution. Distribution is just the final step in a workflow that already has everything the platforms need.
If you've been sitting on podcast episodes because the upload process felt fragmented and tedious, RSS publishing in Podcastr is designed to remove that friction. But I'm curious: what's actually stopping you from hitting publish on your next episode?