As John Spurlock from OP3 points out in a blogpost, Apple's CoreMedia framework is showing some problematic behaviour, causing an under-report of downloads:
When making a request for a given episode, AppleCoreMedia makes two or more HTTP calls: first with a Range header of bytes=0-1, asking for the first two bytes of the file to verify the server supports range requests (these days, most do). It then follows up with one or more HTTP requests for various byte ranges of the file, based on internal heuristics.
👉 The problem for analytics prefixes is that the first bytes=0-1 request is sometimes the only request the prefix will see. That is, AppleCoreMedia sends the subsequent range requests directly to the redirect destination url, bypassing the prefix completely!
Since the podcast_publisher_analytics module's tracker relies on redirects to the audio file, subsequent requests are not caught by the system.
Count downloads with an http range header of bytes=0-1
Fixed
1.0
Analytics
Automatically closed - issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.