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One of my first favorite apps for Android was Google Listen, a Labs project that offered a simple way to track and listen to podcasts on the go. No syncing, minimal set up, just click and listen to your favorite shows. You could search and subscribe from the app, or just add audio RSS feeds into Google Reader and it just worked great.

Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated in a year and it's gotten to be ... pretty break-y. Stuff like subscriptions not updating, not being able to download new shows and, most recently, awful blipping sounds that sound like a skipping old tape. Why an MP3 would sound like an old tape is beyond me. Some combination of clearing the cache, uninstalling and re-installing the app, and getting a new phone usually cleared the problems for a few weeks, but it was bad enough that I searched for an alternative.

The best I've found so far after playing around with about five options is ACast. It's the only thing I've found so far that fits in relatively closely as a drop-in Listen replacement:

• Syncs with my Google Reader Listen folder
• Plays podcasts without having to locally sync or tether with my computer
• Works consistently

It's also got a complicated UI and literally thousands of ways to configure it, but since I spend about 20 seconds picking a show and an hour listening, I can get past that.

From the New York Times:

A screenshot from one of On the Go Girls banned applications.Fred Clarke, co-president of a small software company called On the Go Girls, which made Sexy Scratch Off, said that as of Monday all 50 of his company’s applications were no longer available. They included an application in which a woman wearing a swimsuit appeared to wipe finger marks from the iPhone’s screen with a rag and spray bottle.

“I’m shocked,” said Mr. Clarke, who said the company had not had a problem with its applications since the first one went on sale last June. “We’re showing stuff that’s racier than the Disney Channel, but not by much.”

Mr. Clarke said his company had been earning thousands of dollars a day from the App Store.

“It’s very hard to go from making a good living to zero,” he said. “This goes farther than sexy content. For developers, how do you know you aren’t going to invest thousands into a business only to find out one day you’ve been cut off?”

How long until developers start picking platforms they can't get kicked off? Until the risk is greater than the reward, which means "really soon" for anyone who wants anything more provocative than sparkly unicorns in their app. And it's not a new or even particularly shocking phenomenon, since Apple's previously banished dictionaries.

The strangest part is that this is all on the device with a beautifully crafted browser that can, you know, browse the great smut basin that is the Internet.