I made the first free ad blocker for podcasts

Always been annoyed by podcast ads. Searched and found a few apps that can detect and skip them, but they were all paid. So I made a free one. To my knowledge this is the first podcast app with free ad block. iOS (26+) only for now. If the app becomes popular I'll def think of doing an Android version as well.

The app doesn't require a user account. I may open-source it at some point; still thinking about it. If anyone's suspicious about how it's able to be free, i.e. doesn't it cost money to run, are you selling my data (I'm not) etc. I'm happy to explain in the comments.

From a technical perspective, the innovation here is ad detection despite dynamic/programmatic ads, which is the norm in most popular podcasts these days. There is ofc a naive way to do it, but it's expensive and high latency. There is also an even simpler way but it's illegal lol (re-host and serve just one version of the episode). I was able to figure out a way to do it that's cheap, low latency, and legal: Shazam-style audio fingerprinting, except used for matching audio accurately, not identification.

From today on, you never have to listen to a podcast ad again. tearsofjoy.jpeg

Cheers.