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Comment by paulette449 | Hacker News Reader

I listen to hours of podcasts each day (dog-walking, walking, running etc) and am fully immersed in the Apple ecosystem, but the Apple Podcast app is a turkey. Shallow feature set, bugs that never get fixed and an environment that doesn't evolve. It's software that can only be developed by a company that hates its user base. Ugh. I've been using and loving iCatcher for years [1].

[1] - https://joeisanerd.com

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Overcast really destroys everything else I've used for listening to a podcast. Simple and intuitive UI, customizable streaming/download settings, quickly add any podcast - and that's at the free level. I would never go back to Apple or even Spotify.

I rarely get enthusiastic about apps, but it's awesome when one clearly demonstrates a team having gone 'how can we get this right'?

Just so you know, Overcast is not a team. It's one guy.

marco.org

The sheer productivity and boundless creativity of this guy is exceptional. Thanks for the mention.

One of the heroes who allowed my teenage musings to be published on Tumblr. It's so wild and fascinating to know that the same single is behind one of the top podcast player app. Source: https://marco.org/2013/05/20/one-person-product

The Overcast feature set is great and it's my podcast app but the UX & UI is just atrocious.

Tried all the common choices for iOS like Overcast and Castro, but settled on Pocket Casts. It’s cross platform and open source (client only) and in my opinion has the best UX. Also the only one with a reliable offline Apple Watch experience back when I tested them.

I bought PocketCasts early on and my account got grandfathered into a lifetime subscription. Also have no plans of switching.

i really just wish overcast had:

- listen history (with stats, so i can know what i spent the most time on and tell them/reward them accordingly)

- good history search (that doesnt keep searching podcasts im not subscribed to)

- good to-listen search (that doesnt keep searching podcasts im not subscribed to)

- would be nice: on device transcription

Can’t speak to the rest of it, but Marco has said that he’s working on something on the “listen history” front after tons of request from people asking for something à la Spotify Wrapped.

The trick is that he’s very adamantly (and correctly imo) opposed to user tracking of almost any kind, which I think complicates things here

sure but thats not at odds with using data you already have, storing it locally, to strictly improve user experience

Oh for sure, I’m not saying it’s not feasible but I think it’s not unreasonable that people would want this feature to work/sync across multiple devices, and that’s where the much higher complexity comes in since syncing that data reliably using CloudKit seems to be frustrating atm (none of this is my domain at all, just pure speculation based on what I’ve read and recall him saying on podcasts so I could be way off)

+1 for Overcast. Easily my most used app, even more than Music.

My favorite part of Apple podcasts is going to Library | Shows and then having all the show icons rearrange themselves every-time I'm about to click the one I want (as they update).

Only been happening for like 5+ years.

I’ve used the Apple podcasts app to pre-download content for offline listening, only to drive out to the middle of nowhere with no data service only to have the app refuse to load.

It would be much less aggravating to have an app which crashes on launch and never gives the appearance of doing anything, whatsoever.

I've had similar issues with downloading podcasts for offline listening before. One I can reliably hit is:

1. listen to podcast in episode its entirety, podcasts marked it as "listened to"

2. (time passes, if it was cached at all it certainly isn't now)

3. I remember episode, would like to listen on plane/bus/train without eating mobile data. Click the "download" button.

4. download completes, little icon appears showing the file is downloaded

If you assume this means it worked, immediately close the app, you're in for a surprise. Because if you watch, the little "downloaded" icon disappears a second or so after the download finishes, I guess the app goes "oh this was listened to, I can delete the data". What I've found is you need to swipe right (??) to mark the episode as unplayed, then download it.

There's so many silly Apple usability bugs that I encounter - sorry I'm on a roll now so I'll quickly describe my favourite one. The iOS "Clock" app's Timer functionality used to fail to play the selected sound if you set a 30 second timer and didn't touch the device. What happened was the screen was also scheduled to shut off after 30 seconds, and some weirdness caused this to interfere with the sound playing (now fixed, thankfully). I discovered this I was exercising and wanted to do a plank for 30 seconds. What was probably 1 minute later I realised and felt like an idiot :)

HBO Max is the worst offender in this regard. I've downloaded entire seasons of shows only for them to refuse to play without a connection -- after I boarded an airplane.

Broken is better than unreliable.

Awful app. I tried using it because you can use it with the Apple Watch to listen to podcasts without a phone. This is essential for me, because I have a wifi Watch and like to run sans phone.

Apple Podcasts for the Watch apparently will not download any podcast over two hours for offline playback. This limit is not documented anywhere on their website or in any forum. I'm not even sure it's two hours. I just noticed episodes under two hours downloaded, and episodes over two hours didn't.

It is a dealbreaking defect that it cannot download long podcasts. It is also user-hostile and absurd they do not document this limit or at least show an error message.

Apple Podcast app is pure garbage, it doesn’t even sync your library correctly between devices (e.g. marking something as played).

Thank you for pointing out this app! I've been looking for a podcasting app that isn't Apple's and doesn't require you to create an account and store stuff in the cloud. (I just want to access publicly available RSS feeds! How hard is that?)

And man, Apple's Podcast app is terrible. I can't believe how buggy it is, nor can I believe how awful the UI is. It's shocking how bad it is when I compare it to other Apple apps that I love (things like Logic and FCP). Even boring apps like Pages and Numbers are really well made. But they completely dropped the ball on Podcasts and Music. It's bizarre.

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