What is Apple RSS Feed?

When a podcast publisher, say The New York Times, decides to distribute their podcasts through the Apple iTunes store, they create an RSS containing the podcast episodes in reverse chronological order.

When a podcast publisher, say The New York Times, decides to distribute their podcasts through the Apple iTunes store, they create an RSS containing the podcast episodes in reverse chronological order.

Apple Podcasts provides a unique URL for each podcast show that you can use to subscribe to the show inside the Apple Podcast app. The podcast RSS feed is however hidden from the podcast subscribers.

How Podcast Lookup works?

Apple offers a iTunes lookup API that allows you to search for a podcast by its name or by its iTunes ID. The API is public and anyone can use the API without authorization.

The Lookup API, available at https://itunes.apple.com/lookup, returns the podcast publisher’s name, podcast genre, thumbnails and other metadata in addition to the original RSS feed URL.

The Lookup app only works for Apple Podcasts at this time but may be extended to support podcasts hosted on Google Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Podcasts.