If they were to have tried to retroactively charge anyone. That shit would be immediate lawsuits from every dev. And I would hope that all of them would manage to not let it be turned into a simple class action situation. Make them go to court in every possible state and for each dev/studio. Bleed them completely dry and force them into bankruptcy bad enough for the source code to be acquired and open sourced. And after the company is done, then bleed the entire C-staff and anyone that approved this fucked up move. But not just financially bleed either. Got to set some real fucking examples about fucking around. Maybe even make it fun for the devs that would’ve ended up paying the most, and let them drive a knife in their backs for every charge that the devs would’ve been charged.
Pocket Casts isn’t on Android. I kept hearing it brought up when I was looking to replace DoggCatcher and went with Podcast Addict. Took Google so long to finally allow people to manually add feeds from URL. Which was why I never really used it unless just wanting to stream an old ep of a listed show randomly. So when they added that ability, I was happy to see they seemed to be kind of supporting it seriously. But I was already moved to PA and am glad to not gone with Google.
I liked their original Listen app for being ridiculously bare bones and no ads or anything that requires more data. But they killed that long ago. I am not sure if Google just loves to create trust issues with users. Or if they just really have self esteem issues and can only act in dramatic ways that don’t make sense.