Apple Podcasts is the latest podcast app to land on the Amazon Echo. Apple who after a long holdout brought Apple Music to the Amazon Echo now is bringing its podcast apps to the Amazons smart speaker platform.
This is not a surprising move as Spotify announced as well that their podcast app is now available on the Amazon Echo. Apple realizes its services business is the bigger play and that their HomePod business is very slow to be adopted due to its high-end nature and well know competitor Sonos.
There has been a rumor that Apple might be looking to beef up its Apple Podcast offerings with a premium podcast service like AppleTV+ nothing has been confirmed yet, but this move would be the first step in that process. Not to mention Apple wants to stay competitive in this market and they must make this move to compete with big players in podcast apps like Spotify and Pocketcast.
If you link your apple account to your Amazon Echo you can use the new app by saying, “Alexa, play This Week In Tech on Apple Podcasts”. You can also pause playback on the Apple Podcasts app on your phone and pick up where you left off on your Alexa device. Like I said this only seems to work if you actually link your Apple account with the Alexa app.
You can shorten what you need to say to the Amazon Echo by setting the Apple Podcast App to be the preferred podcast provider on your Alexa-enabled device through the Alexa app. This way you would only need to say “Alexa, play This Week In Tech podcast”.