It is not confirmed why Retro Pod was removed from the App Store — neither the developer of the app nor Apple returned The Verge’s request for comment. But it is not hard to imagine that once the app blew up, Apple would not let it stand. The company has a very explicit rule against apps that replicate Apple products.
But Retro Pod had a good run. According to analytics firm Sensor Tower, the app received 443,000 total downloads on iOS, including 275,000 downloads in just the first week of January. It peaked at number 11 among music apps in the US before it was apparently removed by January 8th.
In 2019 a different retroPod app was made available on Android, and is still available there. The linked article below also has a link to a web based iPod player that signs into Apple Music or Spotify, to play your music.
I still have my original iPod player, and a few years back I powered it up, and it was working perfectly. It dates back to the pre-smartphone era (the CD era, in fact) and was really well-built. Of course, it became redundant once smartphones could play music and do much more. An iPod player had a spinning hard drive inside, so it could also work as an early external hard drive for storage.
See https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/13/23553831/ipod-iphone-tiktok-app-retropod-apple-spotify
#technology #music #RetroPod #iPod #retro