I mean, whatever your opinion of his redesign of the app (I know a lot of people were pretty unhappy), he is a host on a podcast that has had Phil Schiller (former head of marketing who was on stage with Jobs for many years) as a guest while he was still an Apple exec. He's a known entity to them.

Further, one of the other hosts is John Siracusa, the guy who wrote in-depth 18 page reviews of MacOS X releases for ArsTechnica for many years. He got a shoutout from Apple's head of software, Craig Federighi, when I attended a live interview in 2019 during the week of their World Wide Developer's Conference (hosted by John Gruber of Daring Fireball). Siracusa must have been in the first few rows because Federighi said something like, "Oh, there's Siracusa." You could label that "fan service" because everyone in that theater knows who he's talking about and it's a form of acknowledging the crowd as a community.

So, all of this is to say that Marco is one of the small number of outsiders who could write such a letter on their blog and have upper ranks of Apple hear about it and maybe, maybe not, be curious enough to see what was said. I can't do that. I don't know if you can. But Marco can. I'm glad he took a shot. Whether it means anything, we'll never know.

And yes, the release of his redesign was premature, but I'm ok with the app as my daily podcast driver right now.

Oh I love ATP and even eventually warmed up to Casey. It’s just that “stick to what you know” (or don’t?) thing. I’m not one of those that hate on Tahoe, it’s a temporary distraction, but Overcast more and more looks like some kind of slapped together non native app. He needs to hire a designer, he can afford it.