Skip to main content

One of the best podcasting apps you know is built by a single person

One of the best podcasting apps you know is built by a single person

/

In The Vergecast’s final episode of Solo Acts, Ashley Esqueda speaks with Overcast developer Marco Arment.

Share this story

A close-up image of a phone, the Vergecast logo is prominent, and the UI around it is the orange Overcast one.
The Vergecast logo is old, but Overcast, the app it’s playing on, has been charming us for years.
Image: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

For the last four weeks, Ashley Esqueda has joined The Vergecast each Monday to talk with someone making something really cool on the internet all by themselves. She’s talked with the maker of Hive, the indie developer of the game Birth, the maker of tiny artisan keycaps, and even the person who built the McRib Locator. It felt fitting that, for the final episode of this miniseries, Ashley would talk to one of the original app makers.

Marco Arment has been solo building really cool stuff on the internet for years. While he was the CTO of Tumblr, he launched Instapaper in 2008. He left Tumblr in 2010, sold a majority share of Instapaper in 2013, and then turned his focus to Overcast, one of the absolute best apps you can use for tracking and listening to podcasts.

In the course of all of this, Marco has watched the Apple App Store grow and transform from a nascent market for card games and social media apps to one of the biggest platforms for making money on the web. He knows the platform better than most people. He also knows how to make really cool things — all of which he does solo.