Subscribing on your phone

A private feed is in no directory, so you hand the app its URL.

This is the part that isn’t obvious. A private feed is not in any podcast directory. You cannot find it by searching for its name. You subscribe by handing the app the URL itself.

1. Get the URL, on the computer

$ earmark feed
2026-08-23   0:22:14    10.4 MB  Attention Is All You Need

1 episode(s), 10 MB total
feed      https://filedn.com/XXXX/audio/feed.xml

2. Get that string onto your phone

Text it to yourself, email it, or put it in a note. Then copy it.

3. Paste it into the app

The exact place differs:

App	Where the URL goes
Castbox	The search bar at the top, the same one you’d search a show’s name in. Paste the URL, hit search, and the show comes back as the only result; tap it, then Subscribe.
Overcast	+ → Add URL
Pocket Casts	Profile → Add RSS feed
AntennaPod	+ → Add podcast by RSS address
Apple Podcasts	Library → Edit → Add a Show by URL. Works, but unreliably; don’t design around it

Castbox is the one worth spelling out, because pasting a URL into a search box looks wrong. It isn’t: Castbox detects that what you pasted is a feed rather than a search term and fetches it directly.

4. Publish something and pull to refresh

earmark publish paper.pdf

New episodes appear on the next refresh.

If nothing shows up

Almost always the feed URL doesn’t actually serve. Check from the computer first, before blaming the app:

earmark feed --check

Artwork and show titles are a separate matter: every app caches them aggressively, so a cover you add later can take hours to appear even when episodes are arriving fine.

Authentication

The feed needs none, so nothing else is required. If you ever move to a host behind HTTP basic auth, Castbox and Overcast both accept credentials inlined as https://user:pass@host/path.