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Comment by herghost | Hacker News Reader

It might have been my failure, but I couldn't get the Podcast app to list and play all my outstanding podcasts in the order that they'd arrived. So I had to be regularly fiddling with it to switch what I was listening to rather than just letting a timeline of content play out. Like I said, maybe it was my failure, but it seems like an odd thing to not be really obviously available to a user of a podcast app.

Overcast is my app of choice now, and I subscribe to it since it's such a great app.

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I've heard about the order issues over and over with Apple podcasts, I'm shocked that they haven't been able to figure it out, they have the resources and shops with much fewer folks can make a better podcast app, I guess it's just priorities.

I've personally have been using Pocket Casts since it was the defacto podcast app on Android in like 2012, grandfathered into the premium plan since I purchased it way way back before NPR bought them. Thought I'm considering giving overcast a try. I've heard very good things about it but I'm not sure if it's worth switching over with the subscription.

I'm shocked that they haven't been able to figure it out,

The problem is that it used to work just fine, things broke with iOS 13. I would be happy if they reverted to the Podcasts app circa iOS 11 or 12.

I found the same thing. I forget which update it was, but I used Podcast for years, then one day it got redesigned and it no longer made sense. I tried a few others, and Overcast was the one I found that "just worked".

Exact same story with me. For years the Apple Podcast app was fine and I had no issues with it. One day I didn’t understand the redesign, switched to Overcast and I have been happy ever since.

Same here. I routinely am unable to get it to show latest episodes. I feel the UX is terrible and give it 2 stars.

My suspicion is that it’s the watch that drove the redesign. It only synchronizes podcasts while charging. The watch is also impossible to listen to podcasts with for this reason.

There's a good reason for this though; when transferring data to the watch, Apple has two options: Bluetooth, which goes at a maximum of 2Mbps, or Wi-Fi/LTE, which destroys the battery. You can test this by using the "Download with Apple Watch" feature in Spotify, where it takes hours to do 100 songs unless you disable the Bluetooth on your phone, but then the battery drains on the watch.

As such, the only way to do podcast transfers in a reasonable amount of time is to do them on the charger, because you probably wouldn't want to have your watch die half way through the day because several of your subscriptions released a bunch of long episodes. This is also why I don't listen to audio from the watch pretty much ever.

Right, and it would be totally crazy to want to choose which episodes and just download those for later eg during a run. Because you can’t do that.

I also experienced this feature.

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