Spotify's podcasts cannot be played in a podcast app or RSS reader
Podcasts are (and have always been) powered by RSS feeds. It's how podcast episodes can be played inside any podcast app. However, Spotify has decided not to allow its podcasts to be listened to on anything other than Spotify and, as a result, cannot be embedded in RSS feeds.
Among many other issues, this locks podcast listeners onto the Spotify platform and prevents users from switching to another podcast app or provider without losing all of their podcast subscriptions.
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Confirmed that Spotify's API doesn't provide a way to retrieve the audio files for a podcast creator's episodes. The API offers metadata about each episode, but does not provide a link to a publicly-accessible audio file. A link to an actual audio file needs to be available for each episode in order for it to be playable in any podcast app or RSS reader. The audio file must also be publicly accessible and not require any account creation or login.
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We're compiling a complaint to send to Spotify directly.